The Baker's Secret

by Stephen P. Kiernan

Thalheim’s eyebrows raised. “For me.”

  She nodded, unable to speak.

  “Mademoiselle, if there are errors with rations you should report them, not cook them.”

  “You don’t want this? Because plenty of other people—”

  “Of course I do.” He marched forward and took it from the other end. “The Kommandant’s praises have made your bread legendary. He does not sharing with junior officers.”

  “I hope you enjoy it. And next time I will report the error.”

  The captain seemed to freeze for a moment, still as a statue, weighing, calculating. Then he broke his pose, and for the first time in her presence, he smiled. “Or perhaps not.”

  Emma felt a flush of power. His smile lasted barely a second, but she had seen. The Goat was right. She could play this man. It was an entirely new and agreeable feeling. For the moment she was immune to thoughts of danger.

  “Perhaps not,” she agreed. “And in return . . .”

  “Yes?”

  Remembering the other loaves, she slid on mitts and bent to the oven to lift them out. “Never mind.”

  “Please,” Captain Thalheim said. “Continue.”

  Emma marveled at her coquettishness. She had never been anything but frank with Philippe, direct as an arrow. Where had she learned the wiles she was using now? “I don’t dare say.”

  “I have made ask for you to continue. Please.”

  Emma placed the last baguette on the rack. “It is about my father.” The captain stiffened, but she had embarked, and would not stop now. “I worry about his health, if he has enough to eat, whether he will ever be free.”

  “It is not always so good to ask. A man overlooked may live longer.”

  “It has been almost a year since his arrest,” Emma persisted. “We have had no news of any kind.”

  Thalheim bowed. “I am ordered to Calais for several days. But if you insist, I will make inquire.”

  “I would appreciate that . . . Captain.”

  He lifted his eyes when she said his correct rank, opening his mouth, but no sound came out. He tucked the baguette under his arm.

  “I hope you enjoy the bread,” she said.

  Thalheim clacked his heels together, leaving without another word.

  Chapter 13

  One rations day—when the war was old enough that, had it been a child, it would have been walking and talking—the army uncharacteristically overlooked something of value: Emma spied a hock of ham and seized it. Reduced, it would flavor meals for weeks. A bit of meat clung to it, too, where the army’s kitchens had butchered in haste. Emma showed it to Mémé for an instant, then stuffed the hock into her bag before anyone else might see. She tugged the old woman’s elbow, drawing her back into the street, when a few steps ahead she noticed a new couple departing.

  “Who is that?” she asked of the women standing in line.

  “The Argents,” answered Odette, a basket on her hip. Bringing a basket for rations was the definition of optimism.

  “I don’t know them,” Emma replied.

  Mémé observed the couple as well. “Strangers.”

  Odette cleared her throat and spat expertly. “The woman’s family owns the center villa on the bluff.”

  “The big stone place? Why didn’t the army take it over, like the others?”

  “No electricity. But look at the fancy shoes on them,” Odette muttered. “You’d never know there was a war on.”

  “Why would anyone come here? Especially people with money?”

  “They’re in no danger. Wars are always fought by poor folk, on behalf of the rich folk.” Odette switched the basket to her other hip. “Her family’s in banking, or was, anyway. Argent, the husband, is a philosophy professor. I heard they walked all the way from Paris. How rich they must be, to have those shoes waiting here for them.”

  “Must be nice,” Emma agreed, wending away from the line.

  “Baby,” Mémé declared, knuckling her ear. “Baby.”

  Odette smirked, making eye contact with Emma. A more tactful neighbor would have ignored Mémé’s nonsense, Emma thought, steering her grandmother away.

  “Baby,” Mémé repeated in a whisper, pointing with her chin.

  Emma glanced back at the Argent couple. The woman walked with a sway in her hips, duckfooted, while the young professor hung by her elbow in a visibly solicitous way, as if she were fragile. Her belly might not be showing yet, but their manner was. Perhaps Mémé was not as batty as she seemed.

  The answer to Thalheim’s inquiry arrived within a week, but in an unexpected form. Odette came running into the barnyard, her giant bosom heaving.

  “Emma,” she cried out. “Dear God, Emma.”

  Pirate charged at her like a division of tanks, full throttle and engines roaring.

  “I’ll make you into soup,” Odette threatened, aiming a swift kick, though the bird was too quick and dodged away. “Emma.”

  “What’s the matter?” she said, coming to the door, having left Mémé at the table with a bib and a plate of soggy bread. “You would think the invasion had arrived.”

  Odette tried to swallow but her mouth was too parched. She tugged the front of her blouse out and back to fan herself. “Your father,” she gasped. “All this time they’ve been holding him in the basement of town hall. Now they’re taking him somewhere.”

  “Dear God,” Emma said. “Where?”

  Odette’s face contorted. “The train station.”

  Untying her apron, Emma poked her head into the house. “I’ll return as soon as I can,” she called. Not answering, Mémé played patty-cake with the bread on her plate.

  For a few moments Emma strode beside Odette, but the heavyset woman was too slow, and begging pardon, she dashed on ahead. A crowd had already gathered by the time she reached the station. The black locomotive’s engine was rumbling.

  She saw a group of soldiers, half a dozen with their rifles lowered, staring at the ground and shifting their weight from foot to foot. Two were smoking to pass the time. The station was crowded with villagers, as though someone famous were due to arrive.

  Then Emma spied her father, hustled into the waiting area by two more soldiers. He had a long beard, tangled and gray; his clothes were in tatters.

  “Papa,” she called out, waving her arms. But he did not respond. “Marcel,” Emma cried, using his name for the first time in her life. Yet it caused him to lift his head and scan the crowd.

  But Guillaume had placed himself in the way. “You should not be here,” he growled. “You are in danger, too. And you cannot help your father now.”

  Somehow she squeezed past the giant veterinarian and Emma and her father saw one another across the mayhem.

  “My dear girl,” he called, the soldiers pulling him toward the train. The chubby man began to weep. “My beautiful girl.”

  An officer with a pencil-thin mustache came with a truncheon from behind, and clubbed him between the shoulder blades. Marcel fell to his knees, but the officer gave the soldiers a command, and they dragged him toward the train.

  “You are a good man,” Guillaume called out. “A good man, Marcel.”

  He turned his head as the soldiers hoisted him into a cattle car. “Emmanuelle, my love.” They slammed the sliding door shut.

  “Father—” Emma rushed forward, but Guillaume caught her, pulling her away. The crowd surged toward the train as he took her arm, half carrying her down the lanes toward home.

  They did not pause for more than two kilometers. When Guillaume stopped beside an orchard, Emma was panting. While she caught her breath the veterinarian checked up and down the path. He returned with a grim expression. “Do you want to know why your father was sent to a labor camp?”

  “Because I inquired,” Emma said, her throat raw. “The captain warned me, but I was a fool and made him ask.”

  “No,” the veterinarian said. “It’s because he was one of us. He was a member of the Resistance. A great leader.”

&nbs
p; “Then I spit on your Resistance, and your deadly games.”

  “He knew this could happen someday. Emma, your father was nothing less than heroic.”

  “He was a farmer,” she snapped. “A good man, but simple. And lonely since his wife died. Did you snare him into this war business?”

  Guillaume lowered his voice. “Actually, he was the one who recruited me. We could use your help now, too.”

  “I am not interested.”

  “Did you know that our Kommandant is considered one of the lenient ones? The policy in other places is that if one of their soldiers is killed, thirty citizens are rounded up and shot.”

  “That has nothing to do with my father. And today they hit him with a club because of me.”

  “There is a town south of here,” Guillaume continued, “Oradour-sur-Glane, where someone kidnapped an enemy captain. No one knows who or why, the occupying army could not find out, nor make anyone confess. So they killed everyone, Emma. Man, woman, child, all. Six hundred and forty-two of them. All.”

  “I despise you.” She pushed the man’s huge chest with both hands. “You have sent my father to die.”

  Emma burst away under the archway of trees, dodging through hedgerow shortcuts to reach home before anyone else could infuriate her.

  Odette was there, mopping Mémé’s brow with a damp cloth. Somehow the news had managed to outrun her.

  “What is your name?” the old woman murmured, pivoting back and forth on the couch as if the room contained a crowd. “What is everyone’s name?” But gradually her energy ebbed, and Mémé curled into herself, sniffling. The only other sounds were Odette dipping the cloth in a basin, and the water falling when she wrung it out.

  People gathered in the courtyard, which for once was quiet because Odette had thrown a basket over Pirate. But no one dared enter the home. Guillaume found a place by the barnyard wall. DuFour narrowed his eyes at the veterinarian, who did not so much as notice, before slinking away up the lane. Eventually the Monsignor arrived, and they parted to give him a path.

  He wore black vestments, with a white stole that hung from either side of his neck, and he strode slowly, as though he were leading a long procession. The priest paused outside the house, shaking holy water on the open door. “May the soul of Marcel be protected by the Almighty so that he arrives in a place of peace.”

  Emma glared at him from the floor, where she sat at Mémé’s feet. “Peace? Do you actually believe they are taking him to a place of peace?”

  “God understands suffering,” he answered. “Because He sacrificed His only begotten Son.”

  “Are you actually saying this to me?”

  “Emmanuelle, I hope you will draw close to the comfort of the Lord. There is peace through prayer.”

  “Go mount yourself.”

  Everyone in the room gasped. A murmur passed through the people outside as her curse gossiped outward like rings from a stone hitting a pond.

  “God forgive you,” the Monsignor said, making the sign of the cross.

  “Thank you, but I decline,” Emma said. “All I want now is to help our people survive.” She wiped her face, though it lacked a single tear. “All I want now is to make the occupying army die.”

  Chapter 14

  The next day Emma made bread without seeing, handed baguettes to the Kommandant’s aide without hearing. Numbly she loaded the wooden-wheeled cart with her tools of deceit: the carpetbag, the watering can with a false bottom. Weaving her web had become routine regardless of circumstances. Too many people depended upon it. As with a dairyman who must milk his full-uddered cows the morning after his wife has died, certain kinds of life allow no pause.

  “Gypsy?” Mémé called from the doorway. “We Gypsy?”

  “Not today, dear one,” Emma answered. “Today, me alone.”

  Marguerite stood at Mémé’s elbow; she had arrived just after dawn and refused entreaties to leave. “Go about your business,” she told Emma. “We’ll be fine.”

  Emma slid her arms into the straps of the wagon, which she had adapted after the occupying army took their last horse. She could pull and steer, but when the wagon was full she had to lean back with all her weight to make it stop.

  It was a short march to Pierre’s, where the old man dozed on a chair in the sun. When Emma placed her large glass jug beneath the spigot of his tank, a few drops dribbled out and the flow stopped.

  “That would be the final bit,” Pierre said, sitting up and pointing with his pipestem. “There was more than I’d expected.”

  Emma shook the jug to hear the sloshing of its contents. “Most good things do not last long.”

  “Maybe so.” He reached over to rest a hand on the flank of Curie, his youngest and most docile cow. She swished her tail as a princess might wave her fan. “Personally, I would like my life to stretch long enough to see the Allies come. That will be a fine, fine day.”

  Emma straightened. “None of us will live long enough to see that, because it will never happen.”

  “You have no hope, Emmanuelle.”

  “Can that be eaten?” she said, capping the jug and placing it on her cart. “What does it taste like?”

  Next she went to check on her chickens. She left the wagon at a break in the brush, approaching their pen from a new direction. Emma did not see the dead bird until she had nearly stepped on it.

  The hen must have shown weakness of some kind. It lay in the dirt, eyes hooded, its flank hollowed where the others had pecked it to death. Despite all the effort it had taken to bring that bird into existence, despite all the value it held for Emma and the villagers, on the morning after her father’s injury and exile it caused her no emotion whatsoever. She picked up the hen, examining the small body, how little it weighed considering the worth of what it produced, then wrapped it in a cloth to tuck it away in the carpetbag.

  The other hens puttered about in their usual manner, wary, single-minded. Emma scooped their dish into Pierre’s old feed bag, then set it full by the trough. They gathered and bent to peck away, and she suppressed the urge to slaughter them all.

  Two dodges through the hedgerows later, she arrived at the bungalow of Mademoiselle Michelle. Relieved to see that the soldier’s motorcycle was absent, she knocked on a front door which was newly painted blue. As Michelle opened the door, Emma took several steps back. She had no desire to be invited in.

  “Emmanuelle!” Michelle exclaimed. “What a surprise.”

  “I remember our conversation at the washing,” Emma said.

  “As do I.” Michelle hesitated, stepping out of the house. “I am sorry to hear about your father.”

  Emma waved both hands, as if there were smoke in front of her face. “Your rabbit, is there a regular time that he visits?”

  “I told you already that I am no strumpet.”

  Emma kept her eyes averted. This was all so distant from the chaste desires she had shared with Philippe. She knew now that they were innocents, they knew nothing. “Do you have a routine? Has he assigned a certain hour for you? That is what I am asking.”

  “Why?”

  Emma fidgeted with her dress and said nothing. She ran a hand along the wagon wheel, then pulled it away. A glance told Emma that Michelle looked radiant, whereas she was wearing the same dress she’d had on since Monday.

  “Most days he cannot come here at all,” Michelle answered. “But when he does, it is in the early afternoon.”

  “Always by motorcycle?”

  “Otherwise it’s an awfully long walk.” She smiled. “Though I suspect Lieutenant Planeg would crawl if he had to.”

  Emma scanned the surrounding field. The bungalow sat atop a steep rise. She had never considered the prospect from here, a place one could watch the roads and know people’s business, the sea a distant northern glimmer. “Do you have a bright cloth of some kind? A colorful shirt, perhaps?”

  “My mother left me a red scarf, you might remember seeing me wear it at church last Easter.”

>   “No, but that will do.”

  Michelle leaned on one leg. “What mischief are you up to?”

  “From now on, when your rabbit comes, hang that scarf from the upper window.” Emma stepped closer. “You will keep him inside the house for one solid hour. Can you do that?”

  “What is your purpose in all of this?”

  “After he leaves, you may find an egg in the crook of that tree.” Emma pointed at a chestnut beside the bramble downhill. “Not every day. But some days. Most days, if all goes well.”

  “How is this possible?”

  “If you do not know, then you cannot be forced to tell.”

  Michelle beamed. “But an egg? Every day he visits?”

  “Most days, as I said. But this machine has many moving parts. You must keep him in for the full hour, I don’t care how.”

  “I believe I can manage that,” Michelle said, in a tone that caused Emma to regard her directly. She seemed taller, more confident, less a fool than a survivor. Michelle knew something, Emma realized, about which she herself was wholly ignorant.

  “Here.” She dug in the carpetbag and handed Michelle a bundle of cloth. “Unwrap this after I’ve gone.”

  Emma slid the harness straps over her shoulders, pulling the wood-wheeled wagon away and down the hill. Michelle watched until it had turned at the bottom of the lane, heading neither right toward home nor straight toward the village center, but left, in the direction of the harbor.

  Then she unfolded the cloth, carefully, to discover that she held the broken body of a chicken. It was strange to receive a dead thing, and Michelle gazed with some puzzlement in the direction Emma had gone, before realizing that for her and the lieutenant, this gift would make an unexpected feast.

  Chapter 15

  Emma spied Apollo a distance ahead, ambling up the dirt road above the harbor. In her wooden cart she carried the last bit of fuel for Yves, whose boat sat becalmed in the tween-tide waters below. But the old horse rounded a corner out of sight, so that in following, Emma nearly stumbled into a truck of the occupying army, broken down in the middle of the lane. Its hood was open wide, like a great metal mouth, while something black dripped to a puddle in the dirt beneath.