The Baker's Secret(15)
That evening, two more soldiers pushed open the door of the house without knocking. They stood at attention under the lintel, guns ready. Emma sat on the couch holding Mémé, who rocked forward and backward and kept asking what day it was.
“Tuesday,” Emma told her grandmother. “It’s Tuesday, Mémé.”
“Yes, but what day is it today?”
Captain Thalheim entered and wrinkled his nose as if the room had a smell. Emma recognized him, despite the helmet pulled low over his eyes.
“There is no man in this house now,” he announced. “There should be a man here, for your safety and security.”
Emma held Mémé and did not reply.
Thalheim snapped at the soldiers. They began rummaging through the house, poking their rifles under cushions and into drawers.
Mémé stood, inching toward the captain and wringing her hands. “What day is it? What day?”
The soldiers barged past her without a word, pounding up the stairs with the captain following at a measured pace. A moment later they were back in the parlor.
“I will take the room with the southern window,” the captain said in Emma’s language. “It has superior light.”
“But that is where Mémé sleeps,” she told the floor.
“It will do nicely.” He turned to his men. “Bring my things.”
That night Mémé slept on the couch, as confused as a fresh-shorn lamb, while Emma lay close on the rug. The next morning’s baking was marred by a banging from the house. Leaving her kneading board to peer out the barn door, Emma saw Thalheim on a chair, hammering a two-meter pole into a bracket against the house. From that pole, in red and white with a black icon that resembled a man running, hung the occupying army’s flag.
Her stomach turned, and she stumbled back to work. She missed the stability of her father. She missed the patience of Philippe. There were no flags for these allegiances.
Soon the captain began performing what he called inspections but she considered interruptions. He would sidle across the barnyard to smoke a cigarette, stand in the baking shed doorway, and complain. “Are the peoples of this village truly the dullest on earth? I’ve seen more of spirit in mules. And how can you be standing the heat of that oven? It is a vexation.”
Emma did not answer, but not out of fear or respect. Through self-possession, she was denying him whatever it was he wanted. She considered silence an eloquent form of rebellion.
Thalheim spoke her language like a mathematics textbook. But his eyes never stopped surveying the barn’s dusty interior, as if he expected to find a cannon hidden among the hay bales, a tank concealed in the chicken coop. Eventually he would tire of his own voice, climb on his motorcycle, and rattle away.
With a soldier in the house, making extra loaves required twice the cleverness. Soon, however, Emma discovered that she could tell from the barn when he had wakened because he was both noisy and vain. He shaved each morning with as much care as if he were performing surgery. He kept his fingernails pared and curved, leaving the cuttings for Emma to clean. He thought nothing of standing at the mirror for full minutes, adjusting his helmet to the perfect angle. These doings gave her time to hide whatever needed hiding.
Emma’s extra flour ration was snow white and fine, in contrast with the half-ground brown that ordinary folk had to accept. Bread became her clock, her rhythm, her means of survival. Like Scheherazade pleasing the Sultan with a new tale every night, each batch of loaves purchased Emma another day, another round of the village, two baguettes to share among the starving.
Before the occupation Emma had worn her thick locks loose, graced by a green ribbon. Philippe had loved her hair, loved loosening that ribbon. One thing she admired about him was that he played no games about love. Her role was to remain coy, and safeguard the virtue of them both. Philippe trusted her with that power, because it allowed him to make no pretense of concealing his desire.
The occupation, however, had taught Emma that wanting was dangerous. She had only to consider what had happened to Michelle. At one time she had been the village beauty, the person against whose allure adolescent Emma had most often compared herself, and always found herself wanting. Michelle had skin both smooth and radiant, hair so blond it shone white in summer. Her bosom matured early and generously, her lips were as full as fruit. As she grew up, first boys made fools of themselves around her, then teens did, then grown men. She became the village’s schoolmistress, expert in grammar, arithmetic, and deflecting the attentions of her students’ fathers.
Then Michelle took up with a junior officer in the occupying army, one Lieutenant Planeg, handsome like a gelding with icy blue eyes. Sometimes after maneuvers he directed his truck to stop by the schoolhouse, children’s faces at the windows, soldiers in the truck razzing while he stole a kiss before driving on to the garrison. That summer, when the troops took Sundays to swim in the sea, Planeg’s motorcycle could dependably be found standing outside Michelle’s cottage at the top of the knoll.
Now the villagers turned their backs on her in the rations line. Some spat on the ground as she passed. Only the priest would speak with her publicly. The working men, Philippe told Emma during an evening stroll, called her “concubine.” People worried about when school recommenced in the fall. Would parents allow their children to attend? For Emma, no comparison with Michelle would be necessary again.