The Baker's Secret

by Stephen P. Kiernan

  Worried that the commotion would pique her grandmother’s curiosity, and assuming she had time yet while the soldier finished dressing, Emma sidestepped through the steep brush toward Mémé. But no, the motor revved and here he came already, one hand holding the throttle and steering while the other fumbled with the buttons on his shirt. Emma froze.

  It was too late. Planeg zipped past, glancing at first, then turning to look again, directly at Emma. She felt it like cold water thrown in her face. He had seen her plainly and without cover. The hose in her hand, the jug. He buzzed away, not pausing, a black comet trailing brown dust. Whatever he had been summoned for mattered more than her presence in the trees, but he would certainly remember seeing her there. Emma sat on the ground, the jug to one side. For the second time that day, she had been found out.

  The motorcycle’s whine dwindled and then the woods were quiet. Emma waited a bit longer, in case Michelle had lingered to gaze after her lover, before rising to continue downhill. But there was noise in the brush. Emma leaned past a fan of ferns to see Michelle, tiptoeing up to the chestnut tree.

  Her dress hung loosely open, not one button fastened, but with a webbing of lace beneath. Emma pulled a fern aside for a better view. She knew women’s bodies, of course—her own, Mémé’s—but strictly in matter-of-fact fashion: washing to avoid illness, dressing for durability and work. This attire, this allure, was something different, brazen, arresting.

  Michelle reached for her egg, and her breasts were revealed to broad daylight, pink and full. Emma immediately thought of Philippe, his warm lips on her skin, his kisses on her nipples, and she felt a sudden private kinship with Michelle. This woman’s affair with Planeg was not so foreign after all.

  Michelle stepped back from the tree. Her hair was wild in disarray, yet the more beautiful for it, her lips swelled as from mad kisses. Showing immense care, she cracked the egg with her fingers and split it, slowly pouring from one half to the other. Emma recognized this old baker’s trick. Uncle Ezra had called it hand-by-hand, a way to separate an egg’s whites from the yolk without dirtying a bowl. Emma herself never dared do it without something beneath, in case she spilled. How had this woman learned such a skill?

  Before she could imagine an explanation, Michelle tilted one half of the shell, gliding the yellow into her mouth. She swallowed the yolk whole, an audible gulp. Then she raised the other half, unceremoniously pouring the raw whites onto the top of her scalp. Emma watched dumbfounded as the woman tossed the shells aside and used both hands to work the ooze into her hair, making it thicken and glisten.

  Emma felt a flutter in her insides. It was frightening and strange, and she was unable to look away. What Emma felt was not desire, but fascination with another’s desire. She and Michelle were the same age, they had been schoolmates. Yet never in her life had Emma lavished such rich attention on her hair, or any other part of herself. She had spent so much energy striving, she had forgotten entirely about delight. For a moment it seemed as if she had never had a childhood. The one concession she made to vanity, the hair bows Philippe loved to untie, she had stopped wearing on the day he was conscripted. Since then, the occupation had turned her nearly into a farm animal, concerned with practicality and the next meal. But Michelle had kept pleasure in her life, had made it key to her survival. It was an entirely opposite response to the occupation, arguably a superior one. For one lonely moment Emma could not deny it: she contained a great reservoir of sadness.

  Michelle finished combing the whites through her hair, working from the crown to the ends, then turned to climb the hill toward her bungalow, open garments trailing, blue door open, red banner flying.

  Chapter 23

  Yves stood on the dock, watching soldiers load his day’s catch into their truck. Bitterns stood at the water’s edge, their feathered heads raised as though they were supervising. An officer swaggered over to the fisherman.

  “You are less good as before,” he said. “You used to catch more.”

  “That was when I could go farther out to set my nets,” Yves answered, bristling. He bent to coil a rope. “I need more fuel.”

  “Everyone around this place,” the officer said, shaking his head. “Forever holding your hands out. Give me this, more of that. No pride. If we did not need they fish, I say shoot they all.”

  “That may happen anyway, right?”

  The officer laughed. “You have a dark humor.”

  “Was I joking?”

  A private presented himself to announce that the last of the fish was loaded. “Right in time,” the officer said, nodding in Emma’s direction. “Your girlfriend is now arrive.”

  She pulled the cart aside to give the truck room as it lumbered up from the docks. By the time she reached his boat, Yves sat on the bow massaging one hand with the other. “I am running out of patience with these people,” he said.

  “Likewise,” Emma answered, drawing back a cloth to reveal her jug. “Yet it continues.”

  “Fishing is hard work. It galls me to do it for them.”

  She nodded. “Baking is not hard work, but it galls me, too.”

  Yves took the fuel to the stern. “Maybe they will run out of patience as well, and do us the favor of shooting one another.”

  “You have the imagination of a poet.”

  “Or a clown.” Yves tipped the jug’s contents into his tank. “The wind is nothing today, so this sip will get us ten or fifteen kilometers out. More for everyone, if all goes well.”

  “Let us hope so.”

  “Where do you find this fuel, Emma?”

  She shrugged. “Who knew Monkey Boy peed gasoline?”

  Yves chuckled, returning with the empty jug. “You know, I had a decent run this morning, not half bad. But they took everything. Every single fish.”

  “Yves, people are taking risks to provide this fuel. They are counting on me to bring them something in return.”

  “So I kept something the soldiers didn’t want.” He disappeared into the cabin, returning a moment later with two lobsters, their claws spread wide.

  “Nasty.” Emma recoiled. “Uglier than spiders.”

  “They’re delicious, believe me.”

  She wrapped each of the lobsters in cloth, placing them in her cart, and returning with one third of a baguette. “Do I come later for more fish?”

  “I owe you so much.” Yves took the bread in both hands. “I will return only when I have caught something.”

  When Emma brought the first of the ocean spiders to Odette, the buxom woman clapped her hands together. “Excellent, excellent. A perfect way to celebrate.”

  Emma stood in the doorway of the café, which was deserted in that hour between late lunches and early dinners. “What on this battered world can there possibly be to celebrate?”

  “The fall of Rome.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The soldiers were blabbering about it at the noon meal. The Allies have taken Rome. Mark this day, the fifth of June. The Fascists are in retreat.”

  Emma lowered herself into a chair. “Rome.”

  “You see? The Allies have retaken the capital of an occupied nation. When the soldiers were discussing it, all doom and disaster, that was more delicious than a banquet.”

  “Odette.” Emma dug a thumbnail into the tabletop. “How long did it take?”

  “From Sicily to Rome? Two years, I believe.”

  “Do you think we can survive that long?”

  Odette nodded. “Easily.”

  “Easily,” Emma echoed, and they both laughed. But when they finished, their silence was long.

  Odette took a bottle of Calvados from the shelf and poured them each a small glass. Lowering herself into the other chair at Emma’s table, she folded her pudgy fingers. “You know what this means,” she said. “We are next. They have to come here now.”

  Emma shook her head. “They will never come.”

  “Oh, you.” Odette threw back her drink in one gulp.

&
nbsp; “Too many people use hope to hide their misery.”

  “That is the pessimism of the fortunate.”

  Emma interrupted her swallow of Calvados. “Excuse me?”

  “You, for example, have Mémé out there in the wagon, happily fidgeting while you sit here. That is all you require to get out of bed in the morning. You are needed, as simple as that. But those of us with no family, no such luck, we go for the cheap stuff. We settle for having a sip of hope.”

  “Tell me again how fortunate I am, please.” Emma spoke through gritted teeth. “Uncle Ezra dead, my father gone, my innocent Philippe taken who knows where. Oh, lucky me.”

  Odette stood, taking the lobster into the kitchen. “Be as grouchy as you like. I am going to celebrate.”

  Emma considered her empty glass. Apparently her supply of retorts was drained, too. Hearing pans banging, she called out. “How does one cook those ugly things?”

  “Many methods,” Odette answered from the kitchen doorway. “But for once the best way is also the easiest: boil twelve minutes, perhaps with a diced onion.”

  “What should I do with the other one? Who would eat such a thing?”

  Odette scanned the ceiling as if counting something up there. “The Argent couple, I suppose,” she announced at last.

  “I thought you disliked them.”

  The café owner shrugged. “Not them. Their money. But the woman must be near her time. She’ll need meat to nurse.”

  Three mansions stood apart on the hillcrest, the land sloping away in broad lawns to the bluff, then steep to the sea below. Two of the buildings wore crowns of thorns, wires strung in all directions, trucks and half-tracks parked on the grass, giant flags curling and snapping from the balconies, a bustle of officers in and out like hornets from a nest.

  The third one, between the others, sat dark and quiet, a great face of stone and ornate windows, its sole sign of habitation a thread of smoke spiraling into a June sky that was as gray and lumpy as the underside of an abandoned mattress.

  Emma leaned back against her shoulder harnesses, to prevent the wagon from gaining momentum and careening off the bluff. Mémé hummed to herself in the back, wagging her feet back and forth in large shoes with their patchwork of repairs.

  But there was Monkey Boy, oddly enough, prancing outside one of the command posts like a caprice, until a soldier turned and spoke, at which the lad bolted like a colt.

  Emma slowed to observe. There was something about the boy’s manner, something more than the usual oddness. He turned sideways and began a skipping circuit of the mansion, sidestep, sidestep, from the seaside terrace to the bluff.

  For a moment it appeared as though he would go all the way off. The guard called out, and Monkey Boy turned at the edge and smiled. He reached into his bag and produced an apple, which he held toward the soldier at arm’s length.

  The guard spoke again, and Monkey Boy returned to the terrace in the same sidestep fashion, tossing his head side to side like a rag doll. Reaching the soldier, he offered him the apple.

  By then Emma had pulled up to the third mansion, but her suspicions were fully aroused. Placing a block behind one wheel to keep the wagon from rolling, she moved toward Mémé but scrutinized the boy. She knew the local apples were cultivated for Calvados brandy, making them far too tart to eat.

  The soldier accepted Monkey Boy’s gift, and took a hearty bite. He winced then, puckering from chin to forehead, while the boy clapped his hands and skipped away. Once he had rounded the corner of the great house, the capering changed again, back to that methodical sidestep. As he tottered out of sight, Emma wondered what it was all about.

  “Silly boy,” Mémé said.

  “Yes, dear one,” Emma answered. She untied both of Mémé’s shoes, sliding out the laces and placing them in her lap. “You put these back together, and I’ll return in one minute.”

  Mémé scowled. “Work.”

  “Sorry,” she said, kissing her grandmother on the crown. “I’ll try to improve.”

  The old woman did not answer. Already she was threading one lace through a shoe’s eye, her tongue poked out in concentration. Emma grabbed the sack with the remaining spider, marched to the mansion’s door, and swung the great brass knocker.

  The young man Argent pulled the door open with a finger to his lips. He wore round spectacles and appeared deeply tired. Emma stood in the foyer for a moment, adjusting to the gloom, aware of a quiet so deep it felt as though someone had recently died. Although it was the fifth of June, the place was chilly and damp: those high ceilings, all that stone.

  She followed him to the kitchen, where coals glowed in the hearth. He stirred them with a poker, then reached to a ready pile of broken chairs, backs and legs and arms pointing this way and that like debris from something violent. He took pieces and triangled them on each other in the hearth, and in a moment the wood caught and the room began to warm and brighten.

  Then Emma noticed, on an intact chair, a woman wrapped in a blanket, her hair down and face beatific, a bundle in her arms. Emma approached, and saw that the woman was nursing.

  “Two hours old,” the young man said. “Our miracle.”

  Not a miracle in the least, Emma thought. All it required was mating, for which, based on the evidence, humans apparently possessed an abundant appetite.

  “She’s dozed off,” the mother whispered. “Here, you must hold her.”

  “No thank you,” Emma said, backing away.

  “But yes,” the father said, lifting the baby, placing it in her arms.

  The infant weighed nothing and did not move, yet Emma struggled, elbows awkward and shoulders raised, until her hands found their place and settled. She had never held a newborn before. The mother rose from the chair with fragile dignity. As the blanket trailed behind her, she waddled to a wide chaise by the window and lay down.

  Emma thought this was the most exhausted person she had ever seen. Tucking the blanket around herself, the mother curled up like a dog after a long hunt. Emma studied the miniature being in her arms, a little eggplant, bones and a wrinkled brow like an old man, yet possessing such a powerful calm. A deep, deep quietude.

  The father stood at Emma’s elbow. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

  Emma gazed at the baby, her tiny upturned nose. One hand curled outside the blanket, little fingers with tiny fingernails.

  What were they thinking, to bring a child into a time of war? What did they imagine her life would be like? An impulse surged in Emma, to murder the girl then and there, to smash her head against the fireplace stone, or wring her neck like one more chicken destined for the pot. Spare her a lifetime of misery. Save her parents from the folly of hoping for good things on her behalf. Protect the whole village from wanting something as unlikely as an infant’s well-being.

  “You are the first person other than her parents to hold our baby,” the father continued. “Her name is Gabrielle.”

  Emma found it difficult to speak. “Is that a family name?”

  “No, mademoiselle. After the archangel Gabriel.”

  “Why did you choose him?”

  “Because she will be the one who tells our story,” he said, adjusting his spectacles. “Gabriel was God’s messenger, who delivered news of salvation. Long after you and I are gone, the child who was born into this broken world will be our messenger to the future. She will describe how it was in this time and place, what happened, and how we survived till the Allies came.”

  “They will never come,” Emma said.

  “She will tell it better than you or I could,” he continued, as if Emma had not spoken. “Because she cannot recall, as we do, what life was like before this war. These circumstances are all she will know. Thus she will be the perfect voice for our time.”

  Emma held the bundle out, handing the baby to her father. “That is quite an expectation of someone so small.”

  “But she will have her own private professor,” the mother called from the chaise. “Her own school
ing, here in this kitchen.”

  “Also,” the man added, one finger raised. “This is the size at which all of us begin. Fools and heroes, paupers and kings. All were babies once.” He lowered his face till his nose touched the child’s. “And so lovely.”

  Emma could not imagine any of this happening for her: Philippe returning home intact, the means and opportunity to marry, a secure home, the lovemaking, a healthy pregnancy. Every stage of the sequence was impossible, the whole of it inconceivable. No, Emma thought, she might as well be barren.

  “I must go,” she said. “But I brought something for you.” She dropped the sack on the table, a sound like castanets. “Boil it for twelve minutes and you’ll have decent meat.”

  The professor bowed. “We are grateful.”

  But he did not open the bag. Instead, Emma watched as he crossed the room and climbed onto the chaise with his wife, who slid her hips back against him, the child snuggled between them like a cat. Emma wanted to shake them all, slap them awake, pull them outside and make them see. The hornets in the mansions next door were proof enough of what lay ahead. This child would not be an angel, delivering news to the future. She would suffer, she would be hungry. How did these parents not understand?

  No, they sighed with contentment, murmuring to each other on the chaise. Emma turned away, hurrying through the chilly entry, back out into the day.

  A squall of rain hit her face like thrown water. After threatening all morning, the clouds had finally opened. But no, that was a stray gust. Emma realized the weather was more like a fog. Mémé sat on the wagon yet, ignoring the drizzle, growling with frustration at her shoes.

  “Are you all right?” Emma asked.

  “Almost,” the old woman answered, fidgeting, thumbing a lace through the last remaining hole.

  “Let’s see how you’ve done,” Emma said, examining the finished shoe. It was fully laced, but Mémé had done it in the opposite direction, top to bottom rather than bottom to top. Emma laughed in spite of herself. “A beauty, that’s what you are.” She wrestled the shoe onto Mémé’s foot, tying a knot at the base of her toes.