The Baker's Secret

by Stephen P. Kiernan

  But then she heard singing. Not a graceful melody or fine voice, but a high piping, somewhere between infant and bird. It was the most innocent sound to enter Emma’s ears in as long as she could remember, so she slipped out of her straps and followed it. The singsong came from Odette’s café.

  Finding the front door open a crack, Emma pushed it wider with her splint. There, at a table for two, doodling with her finger on the tablecloth, sat Fleur.

  “I went for water,” she sang, almost in a whisper. “I only went for water.”

  “Is Odette here?” Emma asked.

  The girl needed a moment to answer, bringing herself out of reverie and squinting at Emma as if she did not recognize her.

  “She told me to come here if something went wrong.” Fleur spoke as if she were still singing.

  Emma came to the table and sat across from the girl. “Did something go wrong?”

  “Only the last part. The last little part.”

  Emma looked the girl over. “Are you all right? What happened?”

  “I went for water,” Fleur answered. “That was when the bomb fell into the house. All I did was go for water.”

  “Oh my dear. And your mother—”

  “It’s not my fault. She asked me to.”

  Emma nodded. “I see. I’m very sorry. But truly it’s not your fault at all. You had no way of knowing—”

  “This was only the last little part anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Fleur made a face. “My mother died halfway when they shot my father. Then almost halfway more, after what the soldiers did to her. Today was the last little part. I have been waiting for it.”

  The girl rose and went to the door, which opened onto the village green. Once, this had been a place old men played boules at noon, young men sang during a night of drink, Odette both served and ruled, and now it was deserted. Fleur stuffed her hands into her frock’s deep pockets.

  Emma sat there, ruminating that the girl might be the most beautiful creature she had ever seen. And now another orphan of the war. She came and stood beside Fleur. “What do you have in your pockets, that you must be fiddling with it all the time?”

  The girl shrugged and lifted one hand. It held gardening shears, metal ones with yellow rubber grips on the handles.

  Emma took the thick scissors in her good hand. “You’ve been cutting flowers? How sweet.” But then she opened the shears, and saw that the blades were rutted and gouged. “Or what have you been cutting?”

  The girl grinned, but it was a naughty smile. “Wires.”

  “What do you mean, wires?”

  “Any wires. My father showed me how.”

  Emma ran her thumb along the blades. They were ruined. “I don’t understand.”

  “We villagers have no use for wires. But the soldiers, they need wires for everything. Whenever there is no one around, I snip them. My father said it was good to do this, so I cut some wires almost every day. And now I have no family, which is when Odette said I should come here.”

  “Don’t cry,” Emma said. “It will be all right.”

  Fleur drew her head back, as if from a bad smell. “I am not crying. My father and mother are together. And anyway, do you know how hard it is to feed a ghost?”

  Lost for an answer, Emma gaped a moment at the shears, then held them out to Fleur. The girl tucked them in her pocket, sidled to the table, and began doodling with her finger again.

  “I went for water,” she sang, as if no one else were there. “I only went for water.”

  The radio had gone insane. Thalheim listened with disbelief to reports from all sectors. In one place, hundreds of invading men had assaulted a cliff directly into machine-gun fire, the soldiers continuing to climb despite dozens of their fellows tumbling past them to the ground below. In another location, enemy ships had towed long barges which they scuttled in a semicircle around a village, creating an instant harbor. In yet another place, invading troops had landed accompanied by a corps of bagpipers, the instruments wailing louder than cannon fire as soldiers poured out onto the beach.

  Marksmen of the occupying army had thwarted the landing craft, emptying their guns to prevent attackers from reaching dry ground. Some strafed from side angles, too, littering the sand with invaders’ bodies. In a few places, the exits from the beach had seen such massive assaults, so many invaders flinging themselves forward, soldiers of the occupying army had abandoned their battle stations in fear. However, commanding officers stood at the pillbox doorways, as ordered, and used their pistols to execute these traitors on the spot. Preparation was prevailing. Discipline was winning.

  Eventually Thalheim reached a vantage he knew, stopping the motorcycle to crawl on his belly to the edge of the bluff. His shoulder ached, but he was safe behind barbed wire. The hill was heavily mined, too; he had overseen the work himself.

  What he saw excited him: the beach was covered with wreckage, tanks and trucks and transport craft, all burning and bent. Bodies lay in the open, hundreds of men palsied atop their rifles or languishing in wavelets, halfway out of the sea. To his far right a big ship had run aground. It must have carried ammunition, since it produced nearly continuous explosions.

  There was a smell to the air, metallic as though he had a coin in his mouth, with a whiff of gunpowder that vaguely resembled a campfire. It was not unpleasant, and Thalheim inhaled deeply: the scent of war.

  As he observed, the battle scene made a visible sort of sense, a fine fury along the line of collision below, while a kilometer away the only danger came from sporadic air attacks.

  As if to symbolize the invaders’ feckless ways, a pilotless landing craft careened across the water, nudging aside other boats, running over bodies in the surf, banging against the wooden obstacles, and impaling itself at last on a steel spike with a mine at the tip, whose detonation ripped away the bow and sent the landing craft down in a wake of bubbles and swirls.

  Soon smoke from the ammunition ship had grown so heavy on the beach that shooting momentarily ceased. No one on either side could see to aim. The conflict acquired a strange calm.

  Thalheim could hear big guns down the coast, however, the 88s and mortars with their satisfying throaty report. He could smell the acrid smoke that seemed to come from all directions.

  This was the moment, the fulcrum of the battle, after which the invaders would lose their drive, and defenders of the coastal battlements would counterattack, turning the momentum and driving the Allies back into the sea like some creature not fully evolved, and therefore not equipped to live on this land. The moment of mighty transition was at hand, and if he was not to be a force in the victory, at least he was a loyal witness, for which Thalheim felt gratitude.

  The wind gusted, the view cleared, an enemy destroyer fired from two hundred meters offshore, and the battle recommenced. Yet it seemed as though the next wave of landing craft was delaying, holding back while troops that had already landed fought their way up the sand a few dozen steps, before dying in a squall of gunfire. What kind of leadership would strand so many soldiers here to die? What kind of filth led this army?

  Everything in Thalheim’s sight confirmed his conviction that he belonged to the strongest nation in history, the fiercest warriors, the greatest race. He felt his heart pounding against the ground beneath him.

  From a gap between the landing crafts that held back, a strange floating machine emerged. It was sluggish, wallowing in the surf like a pig in mud. Yet somehow it proved impervious to the firing from the shore. He had never seen an object less seaworthy, but even the 88s could not stop its plodding progress.

  Over a span of minutes, while men on the beaches and men on the bluffs exchanged fire, the casualties entirely on the invading side, this piggish behemoth rose up, taking ordnance from both flanks while water poured off of its sides. The onslaught punctured its inflated skirt until gradually the thing emerged as its true self: a tank. A floating tank.

  While Thalheim marveled that s
uch a device existed, the armored machine began turning its treads, throwing sand as it labored forward. He watched Allied soldiers scampering down the beach to cower behind the tank, hiding themselves as it muddled inland. Its turret was pointed at the nearest beach exit.

  As the Field Marshal had predicted, the pre-aimed guns dropped those soldiers like so many flies, their weapons never fired. Also as planned, the armored machine soon encountered the antitank trench dug above the high-tide mark, a hole as wide as a man and as deep as three, and there it stopped.

  “Now we’ve got you,” the captain said to himself.

  But the tank carried some sort of contraption on its roof, a scaffold which now rose from hydraulic pumps with tedious slowness, unfolded in its middle due to gravity’s pull, and with a screech of metal fell open in front to make a rudimentary bridge.

  The thought occurred to Thalheim for the first time that the enemy might not be completely weak after all, that the invaders might also have prepared. While he watched in horror, the tank set out across the bridge, which sank into the sand, but held.

  Observers above the battle must have been paying attention as well. The nearest pillbox on the bluff unloaded its power downward, a bellow of shooting that pinned invading soldiers behind the tank—one who was foolish enough to poke a head up dropped instantly in the hail of gunfire.

  By then the tank had reached the trench’s other side, where, as ponderous and wrathful as a bull, it at last seemed to take notice of the coastal defenses harassing it. With painstaking patience the turret turned, the long gun barrel lowered, and the bull’s charge took the form of a single shell, blasting into the bluff two meters below the pillbox. As dirt and rocks tumbled down, the fire from above redoubled, machine guns and rifles, a hand grenade thrown though it did not reach nearly far enough, detonating with a harmless geyser of sand, while with the same sluggish determination the turret adjusted slightly, the barrel rose a degree or two, and the tank fired again.

  The shell pierced the pillbox opening, its explosion so powerful the resulting billow contained pieces of guns, helmets, what Thalheim could clearly see was a human leg. With the shot’s echo rattling down the coastline, one person spilled out the rear exit, writhing in the dirt and then still.

  As the bull pawed the earth onward to the beach exit, the pillbox delivered no additional weapon fire. The remaining Allied soldiers fanned out along the side of the tank, as though it led a wedge of geese.

  Thalheim rolled away from the bluff, kicked his motorcycle to life, and fled.

  Chapter 35

  Emma left the wagon at the foot of the knoll, to spare herself the effort of hauling it up to Michelle’s door. She had no eggs to hide in the tree, had not visited her chicks yet. Nor did she expect to siphon fuel that day, since the lieutenant was probably battling the invasion. Still she felt compelled to complete her rounds, to maintain the pretense that life was unchanged, and to enable Thalheim to find her. Then he might do as he would without hurting Mémé.

  The hill proved too steep, and Emma paused halfway to rest against a linden tree. It was in bloom, the fragrance that surrounded her sweet but musky, a fecund contradiction of the deathly pounding coming from the beaches and the smoky scent everywhere else.

  Her ear hurt, her throat, the whole left side of her face. Her right wrist throbbed where the small bones had fractured. She held her splinted hand high to keep blood from adding to its swelling. When it became too heavy, Emma lowered her arm and pushed on. Only then did she notice that the cottage’s blue door stood wide. Something was nailed to it, too. A squirrel? The tail of a fox?

  “Michelle,” she called, drawing nearer. “Mademoiselle?”

  There was no reply. Emma reached the dooryard and saw what hung on the door: a ponytail. A long clump of human hair, precisely the color of Michelle’s.

  Emma leaned into the open doorway. “Hello?”

  The kitchen was a shambles, chairs tipped over, broken glasses and plates. On the counter sat a pair of farm shears, as one would use to cut wool from a lamb. On the floor, clumps of hair drifted here and there in the breeze.

  “Michelle? Are you all right?”

  Still no answer, and Emma grew bold, venturing into the other downstairs room: a settee, a chair by the fire, a footstool. Despite her aches she decided to climb the stairs, the wood complaining under her weight until she reached the landing. One bedroom was plush as for a wealthy person, a four-post bed with sheer linens draped on its frame, a deep mattress and many small pillows. Long gloves and lace things lay tossed on chair backs. All around the room there were candles burned to various heights, perhaps a dozen of them.

  When Emma was fifteen Uncle Ezra had taught her reduction, boiling a full pot of beef or chicken stock down to a quarter cup of spectacular concentrated flavor. Now she understood that there was another kind of reduction, and she had allowed it to happen to her: living made small, a way of life diminished and humiliated. Considering the one candle by whose light she and Mémé ate dinner every night, sharing their one egg and fraction of a baguette, Emma marveled that Michelle had managed to create this room of luxury.

  As if to complete Emma’s thought, the other upstairs room was spare, a pink vanity with a small, matching metal seat. She sat, studying all of the powders and creams, admiring them. Tools of seduction, these artifacts of deception, and her ignorance of such things caused Emma to chuckle.

  Then she made the mistake of looking up. The face that confronted her in the mirror was none she had seen before. The entire left side was bruised from throat to hairline. Her lips were misshapen, the lower one split. Her eye was swollen nearly shut, though she mused that it appeared worse than it felt. Her chin bore a cut that had scabbed hard.

  Emma spoke to the woman in the glass: “Good God, you are ugly.” The woman told her the same thing.

  She picked up a brush and a dish of powder, patting a bit on her left cheek. The bruise remained as visible as ever. She selected a lipstick: red as an embarrassment, red as a wolf lifting his mouth from a fresh kill. She ran the smooth stick across her lips, but it hurt to apply pressure.

  That pain broke all reverie. This was nonsense and indulgence. Emma wiped her sleeve roughly across her mouth; it stung but she did it again till all the lipstick was gone. She licked her fingers and swept the powder from her cheek as well. The stairs seemed louder on the way down.

  Emma stood by the door, considering what the cut hair meant, what kind of retribution it signified. She wondered who in the village had done this. How would that person feel to know that the fish he or she had eaten the day before was caught by Yves because of fuel Emma stole thanks to Michelle’s romance with a lieutenant? It was an awkward irony: After this long an occupation, could anyone say they were entirely unimplicated?

  Emma gimped down to the wagon. The battle burned at the edge of her vision, a thunder of shelling from offshore. Every noise, she knew it in her battered bones, meant that someone was dying.

  The Allies had invaded after all. Emma had never been gladder to be wrong. But if they lost—given that elsewhere a single dead occupying soldier resulted in thirty villagers shot—she figured the entire village could expect execution. If they won, the battle of the beaches would move inland, and every home and barnyard would become a tactical objective, a thing to be fought over. Either way, the bloodshed was barely beginning.

  She slid into her harnesses, body aching, mind alternating between clouded and clear, and trudged on like an animal hardened to its chores. From a distance it may have appeared as though the wagon was pushing her.

  Emma lifted her head, only to see sun pouring through the clouds over the ocean. Great bright beams from sky to sea; as a girl, she had always called that sight God. What should she call it now? The moment that question arrived, she realized that no one had sent for the Monsignor to collect Didier the Goat with his wheelbarrow. The poor man lay in her barnyard, unfuneraled, unmourned. Emma knew where she needed to go next.

 
In the middle of a hedgerow near the village she spied something dangling from a tree. It was just above Dog Hill, the grass June-smooth, the sunflowers only a foot high. When she cleared the shortcut she saw that the something was a person, hung up by his parachute perhaps twenty feet from the ground, the easiest target an occupying army could ask for.

  The paratrooper had been shredded with bullets. His head hung as if he had no neck bones. One of his legs remained attached only by a thin band of muscle. As he swung in the wind, the soldier’s leg moved with a delay: The body turned away, then the leg. The body turned back, then the leg.

  Emma staggered sideways at the horror of it. Or was she weakened by hunger? She could not recall the last time she had eaten. But the day was advancing without regard for her. She pressed against the straps and trudged toward the village.

  On the way she saw a bridge with a gap in its middle. An airplane burning in a field. A mule dead in a ditch, its legs as stiff as wood. At the train station she saw a locomotive engine on its side, the wheels and gears and underside visible. It looked as wrong as a dislocated joint. But Emma pushed on, not resting till she reached St. Agnes by the Sea. Garbage burned in the street. The giant front doors were open wide, one of them hanging by a hinge.

  Emma slipped off the straps and dragged herself up the steps. Hymnals lay scattered in the alcove. Someone had ripped the confessional curtains. She tiptoed farther. The candle beside the altar that was always lit now lay on its side, extinguished. All of the stained-glass windows were shattered, like so many dogmas that could not withstand disbelief.

  Then she saw the shoes, black with holes in the soles, in the sacristy, where no woman was permitted. Emma knew whose shoes they were, and she hurried despite her aches and the rules.

  A shell had struck the church, reducing the back stones to rubble. Day poured in where a wall had stood. The priest’s face looked unharmed, and she felt a second of optimism. But when she knelt to turn his head, and saw the far side ripped completely away, Emma arranged him as he had been.