The Baker's Secret(14)
Sometimes Emma slid her hands inside the back of his shirt, skin touching skin. Sometimes when she was done weeping, Emma lifted her face to be kissed.
In another day, these touches may have flowered into intimacy. Infatuation might have grown into mature love. Instead, in October, the occupying army uprooted Philippe, ordering him to present himself for conscription. He would report in five days, then work in a factory making weapons that the mustached fanatic needed for his hordes.
“You cannot go,” Emma said, clinging to his arm the night before he was to depart. “It will kill me.”
“You know the accord as well as I do.” For once he was turned away from her, standing sideways. “Every three of us who work earn the liberation of one man in a camp. Plus I have been ordered.” He leaned closer to take a deep breath, inhaling the scent of her hair. “There is no choice.”
Come next morning, Philippe stood in the chilly rail yard with others his age and older, brothers and uncles, fathers and cousins. Albin and David, the former bakery apprentices, milled around as if they were tourists needing directions. Even émile, the aged village registrar, joined the crowd as ordered, and he a trembling twig of a man who had spent his lifetime sitting at a counter in the town offices where he stamped papers, filed birth notices, and certified that marriage licenses were filled out properly, dandruff flaking all the while from his thick white hair.
The conscriptees’ faces were as stoical as stone. A soldier with a clipboard called names, mispronouncing them so horribly, under other circumstances it would have been comical. Regardless, people recognized which name was theirs. They left their suitcases and valises where instructed, and formed a silent line beside the huge black locomotive.
The soldier with the clipboard studied émile, grabbing one of his hands for inspection before waving him away as unsuitable. The old man tottered away without looking back.
All that time Emma hid behind a pillar, trying not to weep in public, and failing. Before they parted the previous night, she had permitted Philippe all sorts of liberties, enough to stoke their imaginations and warm their memories till they could see one another again. When the train sounded its shrill whistle and strained away, she felt as though her heart were being ripped from her body.
The locomotive left a cloud of diesel exhaust that offended her mouth for the rest of the day. It tasted of longing.
There was no address to which she might write. Nor were there letters home. The village saw new posters, though, hung on seemingly every blank wall. daddy is well, the blond mother in one of them told her blond toddler. he makes good wages in the fatherland’s factories.
Another, with an army marching in neat rows: abandoned citizens, trust in the protectors of justice and order.
Still another contained an idea so offensive and perplexing, Emma did not understand—nor would her father, Marcel, consent to explain—with cartoons of bespectacled men, fat and effeminate and wearing the British flag for neckties, while all over them crawled rats with long noses and twisted whiskers on whose side was written the word “Jew.”
The losses did not end with her teacher and her lover. A week after Philippe departed, four soldiers appeared in the barnyard, demanding to see Marcel. Emma called to her father, who emerged from the house drying his hands on a dish towel.
“How may I be of assistance, gentlemen?” he asked.
The lead soldier struck him backhanded, knocking him to the ground. Emma rushed forward but Marcel waved her away, and stood by his own power. Then, while he twisted the towel on itself, three of the soldiers ran into the barn, knocking and kicking things.
Her father did not look injured, but Emma had never seen him nervous before. The last time she had seen his face wear that morning’s expression, he’d had a stomach illness that made him vomit for two days. Noises continued from inside the barn, and Emma had an inkling.
As calm as a pond, she turned to the officer. “May I request your name please, sir?”
“How dare you to ask?” he replied, gargling her language.
“If your men spoil my dough for the Kommandant’s bread, he will surely ask me who was responsible.”
The officer deliberated a moment, then yelled to his soldiers. He was interrupted, however, as two men burst out the barn’s side door, cantering into the field across the road.
Emma knew those men, farmers from the outskirts of the village. Ordered to report for conscription, they had obviously disobeyed. Far from being reckless or rebellious, such a decision was understandable: in their absence the crops would wither, their families starve, their fields turn to weeds.
The soldiers spilled out of the barn’s chicken-coop entry. The officer said a few words, after which one soldier dropped to a knee. Raising a rifle to his shoulder, he brought his cheek to the stock with the familiarity of a violinist tucking his instrument under his chin. The farmers gamboled and dodged, the distance shrinking between them and the field’s far hedgerow. Emma found herself unable to look away as the soldier became perfectly still. He breathed out, squeezed the trigger, and one of the farmers fell. Settling himself, he took another deep breath, released it, fired his gun, and the second man dropped.
The officer said a word of praise to the marksman. The other two dragged Emma’s father away.
By midafternoon, the Monsignor had come twice with his wheelbarrow, removing the farmers one at a time. The first funeral would take place the next morning after seven thirty Mass, the body wrapped and at the front and center of St. Agnes by the Sea, the second funeral identically and immediately following.