“Oh, Monsignor.” She sat back on her heels. In a place where everyone knows everyone, where no one’s history is wholly separate from anyone else’s, any death counted as a loss.
Here was the war’s strangest lesson yet. All sorts of people—friends and family, yes, but also adversaries and annoyances—all kinds had died. As they left behind everything, work and home and habits and opinions and even hidden chickens, somehow Emma’s heart broke for all of them, including the ones she couldn’t bear. Somehow their dying made them unhateable.
Emma stood, wondering what to do, who to contact if there was no priest to collect the body. Already flies were circling, she felt a mix of pity and disgust. She could not leave him here to rot.
Sacrilege though it was, Emma opened the cabinet that held priestly vestments. She ran her fingers over the garments, some of which she recognized from the religious seasons: red for Pentecost, rose for Advent, white for Easter.
Memories flooded through her, incense and singing and prayer. Emma remembered her First Communion, when she was more excited about the white dress Mémé had sewn her than about sharing in the bread and wine.
And now the priest was dead, his crime an insistence on his faith, and his punishment the spending of his life’s one mortality.
Emma found a purple altar cloth, from Lent or the Stations of the Cross. The raiments of ritual carried too many meanings on a day with so much death. She latched the cabinet closed and bent to her task.
Rolling the priest to one side, she eased him onto the cloth so he could slide on the stone floor. But Emma had only managed to bring him halfway through the doorway when she realized one arm would not be strong enough. She tried using her injured hand, too, but her fingers could not grip. Returning to the closet, she knotted several shawls together, wrapped them around the Monsignor’s legs, then looped them over her shoulders like the wagon straps.
Now she could pull with her body, and he slid easily across the floor. Emma brought him to the front and center of the church, as he had done for so many others. There she wrapped the altar cloth the rest of the way around, tucking in his arms and his legs. She used the shawls to secure his shroud so no flies could enter. For the second time in two days, Emma opened the Communion rail, taking from the altar the thick red book from which the priest read during Mass and placing it on his chest.
Then she stood over him. This man had baptized one hundred and two villagers, including her. He had placed that first Communion wafer on her tongue. Though Emma had been too young to remember, he had performed her mother’s funeral. She ought to say some sort of prayer. But nothing would come.
“If you see God,” she said finally, “ask Him why He stopped loving us.”
Emma waited but the body made no answer. She hobbled down the aisle, out to the wagon and its open loops of harness. There she stood in uncertainty. What now? Where could she expose herself to Thalheim next?
Chapter 36
By late afternoon people had begun exchanging stories about their first Allied soldier. A boy told his friends about one as tall as the doorframe who gave him candy. The boy’s friends called him a fibber. Marguerite described a man who entered her house with his rifle lowered, but tapped the flag on his shoulder to identify himself, and left a pack of cigarettes on her side table.
They handed out powdered coffee. They climbed poles and cut wires. They seemed loose, athletic, well fed.
They were different from the occupying soldiers in other ways, too. Instead of loud, hard boot heels, the invaders wore quiet shoes, and less snug uniforms. They pointed in their mouths to show that they were thirsty. They looked like walking Tannenbaums, festooned with gear from the first-aid kits strapped to their helmets to the canteens on their hips to the grenades clipped on both sides of their chests.
Some wore branches and leaves on their helmets. Some had blackened their faces with pitch. They seemed disorganized, not in the rigid squads the village was accustomed to, but organizing as they found one another, forming units almost improvisationally.
One woman said a soldier had removed his helmet to take out a picture of a girl, which he displayed while holding his hand beside his thigh to indicate the girl’s height. Another woman—her hands permanently scarred from the digging of Dog Hill—was sitting in her kitchen nursing a baby when a soldier burst in with pistol drawn, saw her, and backed out apologizing.
Pierre used his cane to lift the back flap of the officers’ mess. The place was deserted, chairs tipped, meals abandoned half eaten. He spotted the confectionery by the exit, and after a moment’s searching he was rewarded beyond belief: cigarettes. Packs and packs of them, and under the table a large boxful. Immediately he lit one, savoring the flavor, the relief of it, the deepest itch finally scratched. He breathed out a sweet blue plume.
Pierre began to stuff his pockets with packs, but then paused. He slid the box out, and it was not too heavy. After a pack or two for himself, he thought, the rest should go to Emma. She would know who else was in need; she would have a plan for distributing them fairly. He would deliver the box the moment the invasion ended.
Yves inched closer to the fuel depot’s rear fence, which appeared entirely unguarded. One soldier was busy at the front fueling a line of trucks, the drivers all shouting at him while he scurried here and there. The fisherman helped himself to one tall canister of petrol, snaking it through an opening in the fence and out to a hedgerow, then another, then a third that was smaller but had straps so he could carry it on his back. The weight of the three together was just within his capacity to lift.
No point in carrying the containers to his boat, Yves reasoned. The harbor was as unsafe a place as he could imagine. He would hide the canisters near his home, and the next day bring them to Emma. She would know who needed fuel most, and how to deliver it.
Odette held a finger to her lips and Fleur nodded, following her into the occupying army’s abandoned commissary. The shelves stood floor to ceiling, stretching back along both sides for the length of the tent. There was so much: flour, sugar, coffee, it seemed endless. A sack of potatoes stood a full meter tall.
“It is like the vault of a king,” Odette whispered. Fleur nodded with wide eyes.
Then they spied the eggs, indented trays that held four dozen, stacked twenty trays high.
“Perfect,” Odette said. “Nice and light, and we’ll return for more when it’s safer.”
“Emmanuelle,” Fleur chirped.
“Yes,” Odette continued. “We’ll bring these to Emma. She’ll know what to do.”
With that she lifted a dozen or so trays and hurried away. Fleur paused, snatched four eggs from the next tray to tuck in her apron pockets, and scurried to catch up.
Emma intended to check on Yves, to see if he had managed to fish that day, people would be wanting their dinner, but the war would not let her anywhere near. The battles were like hornets’ nests, fierce angers in one place with relative quiet a kilometer or so away. She pulled the wagon numbly along the village’s western edge, as close to the fighting as she dared. Perspiration beaded on her brow, a fever from her injuries, and she staggered in the road. Someone was coming, she could tell, skipping toward her—who would skip on a day such as this?—but her head was spinning and she needed water. Slipping off her harnesses, she tried to reach the canteen in the back of her wagon. But her legs felt like lead, her eyes fluttered. Emma dropped to her knees, then tumbled forward in the dirt.
The skipping person was Monkey Boy. At last he had found someone to tell everything. But before he could reach her, she had been shot. Five hundred and ten, and he stopped in the road.
But she was moving, one arm twitching. Monkey Boy ran till he reached her body on the ground. Rolling Emma onto her back, he recoiled at her battered face. He examined the rest of her, and there was no bleeding place. She had not been shot. Also she was still breathing. Still five hundred and nine, then.
Monkey Boy had a secret, which was that climbing trees al
l day makes a body strong. Arms like ropes, back muscles like cables. He lifted Emma onto his shoulder as if she weighed as little as a puppy, and laid her in the back of the wagon as gently as if that puppy were asleep. She murmured, and he saw her lips were cracked.
Rummaging in the wagon’s bins, he found the canteen. The top unscrewed, he poured a splash in her mouth. She coughed, eyes opening with a wince. But when she saw who it was, Emma took the canteen, and drank from it for many loud gulps.
Monkey Boy scurried to the front of the wagon. Spying from high in the branches, he had seen her do this many times. Often he had imagined himself in this very situation, leading the wagon, being important. He slid his arms into the harnesses. While Emma recovered in back, he pulled in the direction of the special sycamore. Instead of telling her, he would show.
As they drew nearer to the coast, soldiers from both armies passed them. At one point they saw three of the Allied invaders hunched around a machine gun, and one of them put a finger to his lips. Monkey Boy froze. Five of the occupying soldiers rounded the corner, bent low and arguing in hushed voices. Before they noticed, though, the machine gun fired a great loud burst, and all five men lay sprawled in the road. Startled, Monkey Boy pressed a palm to his chest. Five hundred and fourteen.
Soon he and Emma reached the sycamore, perched on a promontory so steep and rocky the occupying army had not fortified it, and the invading army had not attacked it. Under the tree’s broad paternal arms, Monkey Boy cooed like the messenger pigeon from a day before. This tree was a difficult climb, because the first branch began so far up the trunk. But an idea flashed in his head: the wagon could provide a boost.
Monkey Boy towed it into place. The fighting popped and banged and roared, some of it less than a hundred meters away. He set blocks behind the wheels, as he had seen Emma do. Then he skipped around to the back of the wagon and pulled on her good arm.
“What do you think you are doing?”
“Come see.” He raised her up, starting a fireman’s carry.
“Get off of me.” Emma yanked back so hard her injured arm banged the wagon’s hull. She closed her eyes, the pain rising like a fire, then retreating slowly like a coal going dim.
“So sorry,” Monkey Boy said, bobbing like a duck in small waves. “So sorry. But you have to see. You want to see.”
“What are you talking about? What do I want to see?”
He pressed his hands together as if in prayer. “Please come see. I should not be the only one.”
“See what?” she said through gritted teeth. “Tell me.”
He jumped away, then back, unable to contain himself. “This.” He threw his hands in the direction of the beach, again and again. “This, this.”
“Monkey Boy,” Emma said, her voice as steadying as she could make it. “Calm down. What must I see?”
He stretched his arms wide and smiled with the whole of his face. “How they save us.”
Later that day, Emma herself could not describe how they managed it. Monkey Boy removed the wagon slings and tied them to his shoulders. She slid them up her legs to the thigh, then hooked her good arm around his chest. And the boy she thought of as half simpleton, half elf, stood on the platform of the wagon and lifted them both up into the largest tree on the coast, as hidden as squirrels but with a view as for eagles.
Soon they were standing where the thick first branch met the trunk, and from there he climbed like it was a ladder, hand and foot, up and away from the wagon, Emma’s face burrowed into his back while she clung and gritted her teeth and told herself: He will not let you fall. This is not how you die.
“There,” Monkey Boy said at last, his back warm and breath hard, but his voice still a youthful chirrup. “Here we all are.”
At first Emma could not see. She had to step out of the harnesses, her good arm hugging the trunk, until she was clear of him. Then she pressed herself to the tree and slid inch by inch around to the side that faced the ocean.
When she opened her eyes, Monkey Boy sat five meters out on a limb, swinging his legs. He grinned and pointed. “That way.”
Emma turned, and saw the end of the world. A ship larger than any floating thing she had seen before, ten times the length of Yves’s fishing boat, listed in the sand, fire bellowing from its middle. Tanks pointed nose first into the beach, their rumps in the air. An airplane, one of its wings missing, perched on its tail as if a giant had planted it. Trucks with stars on their rooftop canvas lay on their sides, or stood stationary with all doors wide. Different hues of smoke rose here and there, light gray to darkest black, some of it so thick she could not tell what was burning.
More than anything, though, Emma saw bodies. They lay in all sorts of positions, clustered at the waterline and here and there all over the beach. None of them were moving. A group of soldiers waded in the surf, collecting more bodies and towing them by one limb or another onto the beach, where still other soldiers hoisted them to lie in a row like a makeshift morgue. A man with a clipboard inspected each new body as it arrived, then made a note on his papers.
From down the beach she could hear machine-gun fire, the sip-sip sound bullets made when they entered the sand. A cluster of men dispatched toward the shooting, throwing grenades and using flamethrowers, until the machine gun stopped.
Other men rolled out tracks of wire mesh, a makeshift road on which the few trucks still working now made their way. She heard fighting at one of the beach exits, but it was too far to see. Emma could tell, however, that the Atlantic Wall which Thalheim had been so proud of, those four years of work, had not held the Allies off for more than half a day. How many bodies it had required, though, how many young men to prove a fanatic wrong.
Emma turned to Monkey Boy, heart in her throat, and he was still grinning.
“What in the world can you be smiling about?” She could barely speak. “Don’t you see all of this?”
Monkey Boy squeezed the limb with his legs to secure himself, while opening both arms toward the beach. “For us.”
Emma looked again. The dead outnumbered the population of the village of Vergers. They outnumbered all the people she had seen in her life.
Yet more machines and men were landing by the minute, trucks with balloons over their heads like miniature zeppelins, tanks, half-tracks, Jeeps, more ships approaching from the horizon, men with red flags directing traffic, an army pouring onto these sands hardly five kilometers from the village.
There was nothing for the invading hordes to gain. With the livestock gone, lands flooded, people cowed, there would be no spoils. Then why?
Emma suffered daily for friends and neighbors. They were doing it for strangers, throwing themselves on that beach, slaughtered till the sea ran dark, and another wave came, and was slaughtered, and another, whole cities of men. They had never met Emma, she would never meet them, and still another wave.
It was so humbling, Emma clung to the tree and did not think she could continue to breathe. The weight of their sacrifice might crush her. Here they had died, and up the beach they were still dying, in flocks and willingly for the idea that she, Emma herself, and her friends and family and neighbors, ought to live in freedom. Who on earth deserved such a gift?
She turned again to Monkey Boy, tears stinging the cut on her chin, and she nodded. “For us.”
Monkey Boy pulled the wagon with his chest puffed out. It was easy work compared with climbing. Also the woman who fed everyone rode in back, teaching him all sorts of shortcuts. If he knew trees, she knew forests, and it filled him with awe.
The fighting had moved inland from the beaches, he could tell. But whenever they approached troops of either army, or heard gunfire, or detected suspicious rustling in the leaves, she pointed with a stick and he towed in that new direction.
Soon they arrived at the barnyard of old Pierre. When they called out, no one answered. The river had flooded most of his land, his three cows corralled by water on a rise of grass near the barn. They seemed calm, however,
their mouths chewing away at nothing.
Emma climbed down from the wagon, leaning on Monkey Boy’s arm, and they tiptoed into the barn. Pierre’s morning buckets sat untouched by the door. Dipping a stick in the milk, she saw that a skin had formed on the surface.
“Not good news,” Emma said.
Monkey Boy nearly laughed out loud. It was all unbearably exciting. The woman dug in her pocket for a small tobacco pipe, and with a groan from bending over, placed it on his milking stool. She spent a moment enjoying that image—in the dusty barn light it seemed like a painting, an artist’s still life—before shuffling out into the yard.
“There’s another stop nearby,” she said, and after a few minutes’ pulling they arrived at a fence of barbed wire, with a sign announcing that the area was mined. Emma climbed down again, sloshing through knee-deep water to the wire, and with a lift of her skirt she had stepped over the fence.
“But the sign,” Monkey Boy said, pointing.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I put it there.”
Emma waded around the hedgerow, but Monkey Boy could still see when her shoulders fell and her head dropped. She raised her arms and seemed to hug herself, swaying there, and he wondered if she was about to fall down again.
Emma turned and waded back to the wagon. “Drowned in their coop,” she said. “Every one of them.”
She gave no further explanation, leaving Monkey Boy to tow the wagon and ponder what it meant. He had not traveled twenty meters, however, when he thought he heard another cow.
“Wait,” Emma said, rising to her knees in the back.
The sound came again, and Monkey Boy knew it was not a cow. He pulled directly toward it, a place they had passed minutes before, but from the other direction so they had not noticed the man lying there, back in the dense hedgerow. He was tangled in ropes, his face smeared with pitch so that his eyes looked startlingly white, his body bent like a question mark.
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