The Baker's Secret

by Stephen P. Kiernan

  No one had fuel. No one had tobacco. No one had lightbulbs. The occupying army had taken everything of value—including this land along the sea, with its lovely view of the beaches, now appropriated for minefields. There was no denying it: all of her neighbors’ desires were impossible.

  Yet somehow Yves had opened a floodgate, like the locks at Honfleur which kept harbor boats afloat under full moons, when the tide could drop fifteen meters overnight. Everyone lacked something; everyone asked Emma for help. This person needed soap, that one shoes, this one medicine, that one a pane of glass.

  There were a few exceptions. First, DuFour, whom no one trusted, and who knew it, and who therefore did not dare make a request of any kind. Second, the priest, who announced that he would offer the holy sacrifice of the Mass regardless of who partook of the blessed sacrament, and thus did not ally himself with either faction.

  Amid all of this activity—a request for razor blades awaiting Emma at the eastern well, another for skin salve as she followed the hedgerows—she spent her days mentally kneading a single question: Why, of all people, were they asking her?

  The question followed her everywhere, even as she made her weekly trek to the village laundry: a metal shed roof over a marble pool, each side long enough for three women kneeling hip by hip to scrub at a time, water supplied by a hand pump at one end, drying racks and clotheslines at the other. As a place for the women of Vergers to gather, the laundry placed second only to the weekly market. But Emma deliberately came at an hour when she could expect to be alone. Afternoon light angled through the trees, dappling the dense hedgerow to the west.

  It was here that Philippe had ventured one noontime when Emma was sixteen, lurking in the bushes while she and the other women scrubbed for their families. He and Emma had been glancing and flirting for so long, she was as aware of his presence as if he had been playing a tuba. Perhaps the women perceived as much, those mothers and aunts and grandmothers, because they finished all at once, as if by some shared understanding. Once they’d departed with their clean loads, Philippe sashayed into the open, stepping on the marble rim of the washing pool and balancing along its edge. Soap had made it slippery, of course. He was halfway across, Emma studiously ignoring him while watching every move, when his foot slipped, his arms windmilled, and her suitor fell face-first, flat into the shallow pool. For a long moment he did not move. Was he hurt? Emma jumped to her feet, tossing aside the shirt she’d been washing, not wanting to get wet, not sure how to help, when Philippe burst upward, shook himself like a dog, took two bold strides across the basin, and kissed her on the mouth.

  Six years had passed since that day. Philippe was far away, no one knew where, and the occupying army had encamped in the village for the rest of time. Kisses were for dreamers, and people with too little work to do. Emma dumped her basket of clothing unceremoniously into the water. Romantic memories were an indulgence she could not afford.

  Washing had become a frustrating chore, too, because of the scarcity of soap. Emma’s clothes did not accommodate this deprivation, her blouses nonetheless growing dusty with flour, her skirts accumulating dirt as usual. Meanwhile Mémé managed to soil every garment within minutes of donning it, spilling from spoons and sloshing her mug. Emma decided to provide her grandmother with one set of clothes per day, and if she made a mess at breakfast, the old woman would have to spend the day in unclean wear. Otherwise the washing would be constant.

  Emma caressed the garments back and forth in the water to help the stains soften. Was every act some version of kneading? For a person commanded to make bread, it might seem so, just as a policeman over the years begins to see all of his neighbors as suspects, a physician notices strangers’ symptoms, a farmer measures a place by the quality of its soil, a merchant is concerned with nothing before an item’s price, and a person living under military occupation seeks perpetually to be free.

  “Pardon me, mademoiselle.”

  Emma jumped in surprise.

  “I am sorry, I did not mean to startle you.” It was Michelle, the woman carrying on with Lieutenant Planeg. Once she and Emma had been rivals in beauty, but there was no comparison anymore. Emma struggled merely to stay clean, while Michelle’s hair was lustrous and blond. She wore a snug chemise with two buttons open at the top, as if she had forgotten to finish dressing herself, or was inviting someone to help complete an undressing, and a crimson bloom of a skirt. Her skin was lucent like a pearl.

  “Mademoiselle.” Emma gestured at the washing. “Forgive me for not standing.”

  “On the contrary, forgive me for not kneeling with you. I failed to dress properly for the occasion.”

  Emma spoke to the water. “You look lovely, as ever.”

  “It is all illusion.”

  Emma raised her eyes. “I think not.”

  Michelle took a long breath, in and out. “Whatever you may have heard, whatever you believe, I am here to ask your help.”

  “A common request lately, although I am ill equipped to help anyone.”

  “You have managed to gain the favor of the occupiers without compromising your honor. That is an achievement.”

  What sort of an admission was Michelle making? Emma wondered while the young woman continued. “You have fed your family. You have kept your household intact. You have done these things without the aid of a man.”

  “I would rather have relied upon my father and Philippe.”

  “I would prefer that for you, too, friend.”

  Emma pondered that sentence a moment. Had they ever been friends? In school, or since? She could not remember.

  “I know I do not look it,” Michelle said. “But I am starving.”

  “You are right. You appear to be very well.”

  “Oh, but if you could see—” She reached to unbutton her chemise further.

  “No, no.” Emma waved her wet hands. “That isn’t necessary.”

  “I am all bones. I have sores on my skin.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it, Michelle. Of course I have sores, too.”

  “Yes, but you do not depend upon your skin as a means of survival.”

  Emma turned and began churning a dress in the water. Michelle was being too familiar. Philippe had always shown Emma’s skin such respect. It was part of her, but the lesser part of what he desired. Or so she believed.

  Michelle knelt in the dirt after all. “I beg of you.”

  “What do you want from me? Stand up.”

  “You have ways of getting things. Everyone knows. Everyone is talking about it.”

  Emma flipped the dress over and spanked a stain out of it. “I have no such ways.”

  Michelle wrung her hands. “If only I had some eggs—”

  “What?” Emma spun at her. “My Mémé is hungry every day. I might actually grow a bit peckish from time to time myself. If I had eggs, do you think I would give them to a whore?”

  Michelle jumped to her feet. “I am no whore. How dare you?”

  “You said your own self that you survive by your skin.”

  “With a man I love. A brilliant lieutenant who is an engineer, who accompanies me to church, who shows me kindness. Something my fellow townspeople cannot manage.”

  “Because you chose him, of all men. An enemy of our people.”

  “You have no idea what it was like. Being beautiful was going to be my doom.”

  Emma scoffed. “I am so full of sympathy it is spilling out of my ears.”

  “Men were circling my house like dogs who have cornered a rabbit.” Michelle had begun to pace, her skirt billowing at each change of direction. “I know what soldiers do. We have all heard the stories. What defenses did I have? I had spent so many years keeping the hounds of our village at bay, all those men with their attentions and appetites, regardless of my honor, regardless of their wives. I could not trust any of them to protect me, not one. But then, my lieutenant—”

  She stopped pacing, composed herself, folded her hands as if attending a cotillion
. “Lieutenant Planeg behaved decently, a proper courting gentleman. He brought me flowers. He called me lady. On the day I finally allowed him in for tea, all the rest of them went away. The soldiers gave me peace. Besides . . .” She paused, seeming to wipe away a tear with the tip of a pinkie. “Who knows how we choose, Emmanuelle? Do you remember choosing Philippe? Or did you simply accept one day that there was a feeling, so powerful and right, and you could not resist?”

  Emma’s hands went still in the water and she did not speak.

  “I am no strumpet.” Michelle adjusted her bodice. “I love this man. I believe he will keep me safe, because our liberators are never going to come.”

  “On that, I happen to agree with you.”

  Michelle wiped dust from her dress where she had knelt. “If you can give me eggs, perhaps I can provide you with something in return. The benefit of his protection, perhaps.”

  Emma drew a blouse up and down the scrubbing board. “I am already safe, thanks to the Kommandant’s infatuation with my bread.”

  “You see?” Michelle said, softening. “We all make deals to stay alive.”

  “This conversation is moot.” She took up a new dress, plunging it under and back. “I have neither eggs, nor any means of obtaining them. But I do wonder what made you think that I might. Why did you come to me?”

  “Because Uncle Ezra helped me.”

  Emma paused in her work. “He did?”

  “Eggs, if he could spare them. Butter. Whenever you made something too botched to sell, he would give it to me. That is how I first bought favor and delay from the soldiers. Lieutenant Planeg in particular loved your éclairs.”

  “Too botched to sell?”

  “He couldn’t bear the idea of you being ashamed.”

  Emma laughed. “Are we talking about the same Uncle Ezra?”

  “We will never know his equal.” Michelle sidled to the edge of the washing basin. “But with all my heart, I hope that you will come close.”

  With a bow, she swept away.

  Emma sat back on her haunches. Uncle Ezra had been helping people all that time? How had she seen only a gruff disciplinarian, a baker more exacting than a physician? And had he aided the others, too—Yves, Pierre, Marguerite?

  It was all too much. In the past she could have discussed a quandary like this with Philippe, depending on his patient listening and quiet practicality. Instead she was utterly alone.

  Emma frowned at the chore still ahead of her. Clothes drifted in the shallow pool like so many floating bodies.

  Chapter 10

  Some days, the bread turned out perfectly. The dough was responsive, the oven consistent, the results superior. Some days, events conspired to help Emma’s purposes succeed. That morning she felt the slightest sensation of ease, of generosity.

  Perhaps want was not a catastrophe. Perhaps it was foreseeable, a predictable result of necessity, a remembering of when life had been easier.

  She stepped out of the baking shed into northern glory: a pale October morning sun, the verdant landscape awaiting harvest, a meek breeze scrubbing the air of all but the fragrance of sea. A bumblebee labored close in curiosity before flying off on his noisy errands.

  Emma heard Mémé humming tunelessly in the kitchen. The baguettes were baking, ready in time for the Kommandant’s aide. Here was a moment of calm, a pause, and Emma lingered in the barn doorway, indulging in an arched back, a full wingspan stretch. Which was when she heard a horse flutter his thick lips.

  There, his neck craned over the door in the barnyard wall, stood Apollo. She felt an impulse to rub his nose, and she surrendered to it. He held still at her touch, calm and gaunt.

  “You, too?” she whispered. “You want something, too?”

  The enormous animal did not move, except to cup both ears in her direction. Emma reached to rub Apollo’s withers while her eyes inspected his body: the once-powerful legs now drawn with hunger, the visible ribs, the great warmth that remained to him.

  “Somehow the world provides for you, doesn’t it?”

  Apollo remained mute. But he leaned forward, pressing against the door. At Emma’s feet there grew a clump of clover, flowering and summer-sweet beside the stone wall, probably the last of the season. The horse stretched his neck toward it, lips smacking, but he could not reach. He tried again, then lifted his head and looked at her with both eyes.

  “You are just like all the others,” Emma said. “Everyone.”

  She bent and picked a handful of clover, and held it under the horse’s nose. He smelled it, cropped the bouquet with his fore-teeth, and chewed thoughtfully. She held the rest on her open palm.

  Maybe it was that simple: she helped the hungry, she fed an animal. One creature’s weed was another creature’s breakfast, and thus could the village be fed.

  “All right,” she told the horse, bending to pick, then offering him more clover. “All right.”

  Part Three

  Cunning

  Chapter 11

  This was how the network began. She let them in, one by one. Drops into a bucket of need, poured out in providing. Every day it grew: a candle here, a sliver of soap there. Each person traded in his or her own currency, had his or her own wants, and Emma bested them all with her method for bread. And her occasional willingness to steal.

  Only from those who supported the occupying army, however. And in a manner so expert and patient, afterward it remained in doubt whether a crime had actually occurred.

  The first victim was that sniveling DuFour. Emma studied his work habits at the town hall, the lazy pace, the arrogant displaying of keys as he locked and unlocked his office, the long lunches he took at home each day. This in a time when most villagers lived with hunger of one severity or other. She could have emptied his office entirely, files, fixtures, and furniture, in the time he lounged and ate. But that would have brought suspicion, arrest, execution.

  Instead she waited for a day on which it rained. After DuFour puttered homeward for lunch, she snuck into his office as quiet as a deer. Rolling his chair to the hallway, she partially unscrewed the overhead lightbulb. The long corridor went dark. She placed the chair precisely where it had been.

  DuFour minced back to work, one hand on his belly, smacking his thin lips. When he entered the darkened hallway, he threw the switch and nothing happened. He tried repeatedly, then rolled the chair himself and tightened the bulb. Of course it lit right up.

  The next day of foul weather, Emma made sure her rounds passed town hall at noon. She needed less than one minute to loosen the bulb and make a retreat. Later the clerk pondered his dark hallway a moment, before bringing his chair over again.

  The third time, he strolled outside, a pantomime of bewilderment as he examined the roof and scratched his pate. Emma sat in the doorway of Uncle Ezra’s bakery, not looking behind herself, not dwelling on the boards still covering where soldiers broke the glass. She pretended to repair her boot, a stockinged foot on the step. DuFour glanced at her, his face pinched and wrinkled like a walnut.

  “Nothing,” he snapped. “Mind your own business.”

  As he waddled back into town hall, Emma bit the inside of her cheek to suppress a smirk.

  It took two more days of rain, five in all, before DuFour flicked the switch, glared up at the dark ceiling fixture, and marched with his many keys off to the locked storage closet. He returned with a fresh bulb. After screwing it into place, he tossed the old one onto the papers in his tall metal wastebin.

  The next day, Emma with her own fingertips spiraled that discarded bulb into the lamp beside Marguerite’s sewing chair. She wished Philippe were there to share the moment, her little triumph.

  But the aging woman had furrowed her brow. “Did you steal this lightbulb?” she asked. “Because if you did . . .”

  “It was given to me,” Emma reassured her. “Someone didn’t need it anymore, and made a gift. My idea was that one generosity might lead to another.”

  “I had not forgotten.”
Marguerite opened the drawer in her side table, removing a packet of tobacco that she pressed into Emma’s hands. Next she reached for the Bible and switched on the lamp. “Let there be light.”

  The other invisible crime was one that preyed upon the Monsignor. Emma had not intended to involve him in her barter and trade, but Pierre’s fuel supply was limited, and Yves’s second daily fishing would burn through it like a young man with his first paycheck. Already sixty people had eaten some of his catch. The villagers depended on Emma. She needed an alternative before a quarter of a tank became none.

  The occupying army possessed fuel, but none of it within Emma’s reach. Captain Thalheim rode a motorcycle, and the Kommandant’s aide used one when he fetched her bread, but neither machine spent any time unattended. Likewise the occupying army kept its trucks and tanks in a motor pool under the snarling supervision of the quartermaster, a growling hogshead of a man, the largest human Emma had ever seen. Pulling her wagon along the bluff one afternoon, she recognized Yves’s boat plying the waves northward, and knew she needed to find another source.

  The next morning she became fortuitously aware of a private matter that the priest had concealed from the entire town. Because her deliveries took her everywhere, at all times of day, Emma had grown better informed than the worst gossips. Thus she spied the Monsignor scuttling behind the rectory in the early hours carrying a bucket of something, and peering in all directions to be sure he was not seen. Emma was no more able to overlook those signals than she could ignore an air-raid siren. She returned while he said morning Mass, sneaking in back by the tall grass. Emma was greeted by a clutch of clucking hens, all delighted by the incorrect supposition that they were being fed again already. The priest, bless his miserly soul, had chickens.

  It was a treasure, nothing less: chickens each produced an egg each day, self-regulated their quality by pecking to death any among them who grew ill or showed weakness, and when their productive time came to an end, they made several meals and soup. No wonder the Monsignor was fat in a world of slender.