The Baker's Secret

by Stephen P. Kiernan

  “Bastard,” she whispered.

  Chapter 4

  Did Emmanuelle feel afraid? Of course. No one in the village was immune. Fear, they learned, did not live in the heart or mind. It inhabited the stomach like a bad oyster. There was nothing to do but endure it. Neither could anyone deny it, because everyone had witnessed what the occupying army did to Uncle Ezra.

  First they made him wear a star. They ordered it, commanded it on one of their posters. Odette was certain he would refuse. This thorny man who showed contempt for his best customers, who bowed to no one, who held himself and all to the same impossible standards? Never.

  But there he was, the day the order took effect, with a six-pointed star sewn onto his tunic. It was yellow, the size of the palm of his hand. He stood in front of his shop, giving everyone an unambiguous view. Others wore the same star, of course, people who villagers might have known were of another faith—had they ever thought about it—because they did not worship at St. Agnes by the Sea. For some reason, the compliance of Uncle Ezra mattered more.

  “Yes,” he barked from the doorway of his shop, slapping the star on his chemise. “Here it is. My mark of David, the house of David. Look all you like.”

  Though his neighbors were obviously not the source of the star regulation, Uncle Ezra directed all of his indignation at them. He paced in the street flexing his fists, spitting in the dirt. In response, people were never kinder: praising his baked goods, buying extra, calling a greeting from down the lane. One day after a thick fog rolled in off the ocean, when he locked his shop for the evening, someone had left a new lantern on his stoop.

  “Here it is,” he nonetheless proclaimed to the square the next morning, slapping his star. “I am doing what I am told. I am an obedient knave.”

  Soldiers entered the library and confiscated all books by Jewish authors. Jews had to carry papers and leave jobs. They would realize that they were under surveillance. Then they would vanish. No one under surveillance was ever found innocent. First you were identified, then you were watched, then you were arrested. A plus B equals C.

  “Here I am,” Uncle Ezra railed in the street, his apron stained with butter, dusted by flour. “Son of Abraham. Child of Isaiah. Here I am.”

  One day soldiers came to the shop. Emma, busy at the giant mixer, did not hear them until one put his rifle butt through the front door’s window and the shattering glass startled her. She switched off the mixer and hurried out front. Soldiers stood on all sides of Uncle Ezra, hollering at him in their harsh language.

  “I don’t understand you,” he said. “What are you saying?”

  The men continued to shout until an officer swaggered into the shop and they silenced. The captain wore his helmet angled forward, hiding his eyes. His mouth was pinched, as though he had bitten into something sour.

  “Unless you are going to buy something, please leave,” Uncle Ezra told the men. “You make my life hard enough, with the flour rationing. You have already emptied my bank account.”

  The captain studied the shop without haste. “We will search,” he said. He barked a word to his men and they began ransacking, breaking shelves, spilling bowls, knocking a cake to the floor. He spoke in a bored tone. “You have nothing to fear, if you have done nothing wrong.”

  “Go home,” Uncle Ezra called to the back of the shop. “Leave now, Emmanuelle.”

  He had never before used her name. But before she could take one step toward the back door, all of the soldiers made the same loud sound: Ahhh. Feigned surprise and genuine joy. One of them had punctured a sack of flour, and from it he seemed to have pulled a pistol—though Emma could see that the gun was as black as a locomotive.

  “What is this?” the captain asked Uncle Ezra, dangling the pistol in front of his face. “What have we here?”

  “I’ve never seen it before,” Uncle Ezra said. “Please leave my shop.”

  “Never seen it? What are you making imply? Did I put it there? Or one of my men? Which one? I will punish him at once.”

  “I don’t even know how to load a gun. What use would I have for possessing one? I know the laws.”

  “I’m sure you do,” the captain said, shaking his head, as if hurt with disappointment. “The penalties as well.”

  He handed the gun back to the soldier who had found it. The others seized Uncle Ezra and pulled him from the store.

  “Go home,” Uncle Ezra called to Emma, but a soldier jammed a rifle into his belly and he said no more.

  They dragged him away. Emma followed at a distance, as did others from the village. This was something wholly new. Although eventually there would be so many incidents of this sort the villagers would lose count, this day was a first, and they were ignorant about what might happen. Naive. Along the way someone had tied Uncle Ezra’s hands, and though the soldiers buffeted him about, he held his head high. Emma saw that his lips were white with rage.

  The crowd arrived at the churchyard, where a row of poplars stood with their pale bark and heart-shaped leaves. The soldiers shoved Uncle Ezra back against one tree and stepped away. Suddenly the people knew, could not believe that they hadn’t known, felt ugly and wrong for being there.

  The captain stood to one side, smoking a cigarette with the rich odor of real tobacco. He had wanted an audience, obviously. The whole event was theater. Emma kept a hand to her mouth as though she might be ill.

  “Have you anything to say for yourself?” the captain asked.

  “I have never seen that gun before,” Uncle Ezra said. He tried to use his best gruff voice, the one the villagers knew and feared, but he was nearly stammering. “If I had hidden it in the flour, it would have been white.”

  The captain laughed, smoke dragoning from his mouth. “Are you defending of yourself? In the face of clear evidence, are you protesting of your innocence?”

  “Of course I am innocent,” Uncle Ezra cried. “I am a baker, a danger to no one. I make bread. Let me go.”

  “Of course you are innocent,” the captain mimicked. He dropped the last of his cigarette on the grass, grinding it with his heel. He sauntered closer to Uncle Ezra, unclipping his holster, pulling out a pistol.

  “I am Captain Thalheim,” he said. “By the way.”

  “For God’s sake,” Uncle Ezra pleaded.

  “Let us pause for a moment here,” Captain Thalheim said, raising the pistol till the barrel was an arm’s length from Uncle Ezra’s face. “Contemplate your mortality.”

  And he waited. The wind blew, just then, pressing Uncle Ezra’s apron against him so that everyone could see the spreading stain and know that he had wet himself, that his last moment on earth would be one of humiliation, the fierce expression gone utterly from his face as his head lowered and all the people saw the bald spot on top.

  “That’s right,” Captain Thalheim said, and he pulled the trigger.

  Part Two

  Want

  Chapter 5

  The following morning, for all to see, someone had carved a V into the poplar’s bark. It was undeniable, an arm’s length above the blood spatter. Revealed, the green wood within wept and then hardened.

  Captain Thalheim gave an order, and a private whose trousers were rolled at the cuff because he was too short for them came and stood before the tree, pondering. Later he returned with a stool and a chisel, peeling away the dappled bark until the V became a carved square. The next day the poplar bore a new V, half a meter higher. Word spread through Vergers like fire through a wheat field. Who had dared? Villagers snuck past, confirming it for themselves, in part to honor Uncle Ezra, in part to see what would happen next.

  The small private fetched a stepladder, reaching up to chisel away another square. A second private stood guard over the tree that night. Yet somehow in the morning a new V appeared, more than two meters up the trunk from the bloodstain. People gossiped about it before Uncle Ezra’s funeral began. Following the execution, the Monsignor had come with a wheelbarrow and brought the body inside St. Agn
es by the Sea, wrapped Uncle Ezra and placed him in a casket at the front and center of the church, performing a memorial service as though they had been of precisely the same faith. Normally the villagers would have discussed this oddity for days, but the new V on the tree took precedence. It gave a strange electricity to their grief. On the way out of the church they stared, confirming it for themselves. Emma alone could not bring herself to pass that way.

  “Not as long as that tree wears its badge of cruelty,” she declared that afternoon to the locals gathered at Odette’s café—by which she meant the reddish-brown blot on the light gray trunk. She had come to deliver a beef reduction which had low-boiled on her home stove the entire night, a bucket of gruelish bone juice concentrated down to one jar of fat and flavor. “I don’t care who is responsible for the V.”

  “It must be Monkey Boy,” Odette told her customers. “No one else can climb that high.”

  “Oh yes,” Emma scoffed. “Our clever young rebel. He is the linchpin of the Resistance.”

  Four days after Uncle Ezra’s execution, Emma had yet to venture back inside the bakery. Sympathetic neighbors had boarded up the front window, which the soldier’s rifle butt had shattered. They had cleaned up the glass. Otherwise the place remained untouched. The cake that soldiers had knocked from the shelf lay yet on the floor, its frosting mottled with mold. Rolls on the counter had staled into stone.

  People were already making inquiries, however, not out of heartlessness but because Easter was coming and thus the need for hot cross buns—however gritty they might taste with low-quality flour and without Uncle Ezra’s trusted touch.

  “Now, Emmanuelle,” Odette said, wiping a table. “Be gentle with us.”

  “He is highly skilled in symbolism,” Emma continued. “For a boy who cannot write his own name.”

  She strode off into the street. No one spoke for some time. At nightfall, when Odette went outside to light the torch—her café now crowded with officers from the occupying army, their booming songs and well-fed gusto, their ruddy skin and strange currency—she spied a light across the way. With the bakery’s front window boarded, Odette could not snoop. But a woman with no family bears extra concern for her neighbors. In a reconnaissance farther down the lane, through the side glass she saw Emma with a broom, sweeping flour from the floor into a trash bin, slowly as if it were a sacred act, slowly so as not to raise a cloud.

  Early the following morning Emma stood at the barn table kneading loaves for the Kommandant, when she heard boot heels clack together.

  She startled, whirling to see Captain Thalheim in her barn. The man who had murdered her teacher raised one boot to rest it on a chunk of wood, as if he were posing for a portrait, helmet low to conceal his eyes, his face shaved as smooth as a grape.

  What means of retaliation did she possess, other than insolence? “Yes, Sergeant?”

  He bristled. “I am a captain.”

  He spoke her language, but clumsily and with his chest puffed out.

  “Of course,” she said. “Sometimes I am as dumb as my feet. What brings you here?”

  “You are the one baking for the Kommandant.”

  In response, Emma raised her floury hands like a surgeon awaiting gloves.

  “So possibly you might be a reasonable to help me.”

  Inwardly Emma boiled with rage, but the pistol remained on Thalheim’s hip and she contained herself enough to shrug as if unconcerned. “Possibly.”

  “Who owns tallest of ladder in this town?”

  “I don’t know,” Emma said. “Why do you ask?”

  “I do not explain my reasons.”

  She turned back to the kneading board. “I have no idea . . . Sergeant.”

  The captain opened his mouth to speak, then paused, weighing his options. At last he started for the door.

  “Wait,” Emma drawled. “I know.”

  Thalheim paused at the doorway. “Yes?”

  “I should have thought of it immediately.” She dawdled, picking a clod of dough off her thumb. “Silly me.”

  “Yes?” he said, tapping his foot. “Out with it, then.”

  “The Monsignor must have the tallest ladder. How else would he change the lightbulbs in the nave of his church?”

  “Thank you,” the captain muttered. A moment later she heard his motorcycle start with a rattle, then growl as he rode away.

  Emma seized the dough and kneaded as though it had disobeyed.

  If she had intended to throw suspicion on the priest, however, she did not succeed. Instead the private obtained a means of reaching the most recent V, higher in the tree, to carve it out of existence. Now the poplar bore three large squares carved in the bark, all above a splatter of brownish red. Two guards stood sentinel that night, with a light trained on the tree as though it were a prisoner who might escape.

  For several days there was no change, until the Kommandant overheard two soldiers complaining about the tedious guard duty. He sought Thalheim personally, finding him in the square outside Odette’s café.

  “There is work to be done,” he snarled at the captain, who hung his head like a scolded schoolboy.

  “Yes, sir. But the people must also be made to respect—”

  “Real work, Captain. War work.”

  Nearby, Odette wiped a table indifferently. Although her mother’s family hailed from Mainz, and she had grown up in a household that spoke the occupying army’s language, she concealed her fluency. By eavesdropping she learned about troop activities, the contents of railcars, and when a senior officer might be visiting.

  Odette recounted the conversation to her neighbors the next day as they lined up outside the schoolhouse for rations.

  “Vee can’t spare gutt men to guart a tree,” she said in exaggerated imitation of the Kommandant, earning the villagers’ laughter. Odette wagged a scolding finger at an imaginary Thalheim. “Vee must prepare for zee invasion.”

  “Which will never come,” Emma whispered to Mémé, who swayed at her elbow in the queue.

  Mémé snapped her teeth. “Shoot.”

  “Shoot who, dear one?”

  “Thalheim.”

  Emma hid a smile. “Let’s not say so in public, all right?”

  Mémé did not reply. She was frowning at her fingers, tangling them together as if they were tied in a knot.

  With the tree guards reassigned, the next morning a new V appeared—above the reach of any ladder, extending into two branches like an embrace of the whole churchyard.

  Everyone agreed that Monkey Boy was not only the sole person capable of such acrobatics, but he was also the least likely to perform them. People saw him wandering the meadows, one arm raised as he called to a passing crow. They saw him on a bench in the village green, sulking like a toddler because his mother had forced him to wash his filthy face. No, someone else was being clever at the occupying army’s expense. The villagers’ speculations made a low buzz, like a hive in a tree branch.

  At last it rained, an all-day seaside downpour that washed the bloodstain away. All that remained was a splintered area where the bullet had lodged after shattering Uncle Ezra’s head.

  Yet Captain Thalheim could not resist one last blow against the rebellion. After the storm passed he dispatched a corporal, a strapping blond with strong arms and a square jaw who brought with him a long-toothed chain saw. The Monsignor monitored the proceedings from the rectory, his cottage across the lane from the church. When the engine snarled to life, the priest marched across the churchyard, one arm raised with the finger pointing at heaven—a sight that would have cowed the stoutest villager. But his shouting about God’s house and the sanctity of church property was inaudible as the corporal revved the chain saw and approached the tree. The soldier never acknowledged him. The blade took its first bite, bark chips flew, and the Monsignor flinched.

  The machine howled while sawing and grumbled while idling as the soldier cut a wedge from one side of the poplar, sliced another from the opposite side, and
the tree dropped unceremoniously onto the churchyard grass. By then the priest had repaired to the rectory, where he scowled behind a half-closed door. As efficient as his tool, the soldier methodically reduced the tree to a stump, the stump to a flat knot on the ground, so low one could stub a toe on it. The poplar had required perhaps fifty years to attain its height, but the soldier’s job took no more than twenty minutes.

  When the muscular corporal shut off the motor, he paused to sit on the downed trunk and smoke a cigarette—few things expressing leisure and indifference more visibly than the expert making of smoke rings—then hoisted the chain saw on his shoulder like a gun and marched back to his unit. He left the fallen limbs and greens behind like litter. Watching him go, the priest lifted the rosary around his neck, kissed the crucifix, and closed the rectory door.

  In those days the villagers let nothing go to waste. Poplar, though a poor burning wood, had other uses, lumber and such. People soon came and hauled everything away.

  That evening the veterinarian’s beautiful daughter, Fleur, knocked on the door in Emma’s barnyard wall, then retreated a few steps. “Is anyone at home?” she piped.

  Emma set aside her chore of the moment and crossed the yard to open the door. Leaning against the bricks was a cross section of the poplar, a circular slice from the tree. “What’s this?”

  But Fleur only curtsied, stuffed her hands into her apron pockets as ever, and trotted away up the lane. Emma examined the slab of wood. From that day forward she used that board for her kneading and rolling, and none other would do.

  Still Captain Thalheim did not have the last word. One day later, all of the churchyard’s remaining poplars bore Vs in the upper branches. So did four ancient oaks that arched over the village green. It was like a story, told in hieroglyphics. Seven days after Uncle Ezra’s death, trees all over town wore tattoos of defiance. No one knew who was responsible. Years later, people who survived those times debated with fervor who had done the carving.