The Baker's Secret(25)
Yet somehow, like the Gypsies, she became a traveling hub of barter and exchange. Somehow she became a deal maker, a keeper of secrets. When did she acquire the wooden-wheeled cart, its horse harness adapted for human pulling? How had she outfitted it with trick suitcases, hidden drawers, a watering can with a false bottom that concealed other liquids beneath? When did this young maker of bread become so circuitous and sly?
The villagers were not the only clever ones. One afternoon Emma was pulling her cart through a crossroads, harnesses over her shoulders and her day of exchanges nearly complete, when she encountered soldiers from the occupying army replacing the road signs.
They were doing it deliberately wrong. One of them was removing the existing signs—bayeux 11 km., with an arrow to the right, caen 29 km., with an arrow to the left. The other soldier hammered replacement signs onto the same post, but saying bayeux 9 km. to the left, caen 51 km. to the right.
The soldiers were not laughing, or joking, or speaking at all. They were entirely matter-of-fact while they posted falsehoods that would misdirect any traveler who was not a local.
“You.” One of the soldiers pointed his hammer at her. “Move along. You go now.”
“Yes,” Emma said, shouldering the harnesses and pulling her way home.
Of course they wanted to mislead people, she thought. They—with their maps, communication wires everywhere, convoys all in a line—had no need of directions. Changing signs was propaganda of the most subtle and brilliant sort. But who thought of sowing this confusion? Who sat around all day, dreaming up such lies?
Above all questions, this: How could any reasonable person retaliate?
Exhausted at the end of her day, Emma was carrying the last of the laundry in from the cart when she heard a scuffling by the door in the barnyard wall. The moon hid behind scudding clouds, so she crept nearer to see what was making the noise. Something harmless, she hoped: a fox, a coypu, so she could finish this final chore and curl up on the floor beside Mémé’s couch. Knowing that the bread task awaited at dawn, she had been imagining that horizontal moment for hours.
Instead of something small and wild, however, the Goat stepped out of the shadows. Emma put down the basket, trying to summon the energy to deliver a statement of unwelcome that would scour his ears. But he was bent with fatigue, his knapsack appearing to be loaded with lead. From his lowered head down, his gait an old man’s shuffle, Emma recognized her own tiredness, and hesitated.
That night in the moonlight, long past curfew, and the occupying army would shoot anything moving at that hour, the Goat did not survey his surroundings at all. He scuffed across the barnyard, opened the hog-shed door, and stumbled inside. She heard him drop the weight of that knapsack.
Although the occupying army had confiscated the last of the pigs years before, the shed still contained a horrible stink. That explained why Didier’s skin was filthy, why no one could bear to stand beside him. The scent clung to him like a garment.
Was there always to be someone who, by comparison, made your circumstances seem fortunate? Emma had thought so after her conversation with Michelle. Imagine romancing an officer of the occupying army because it was your best hope for survival. And now imagine sleeping in a hog shed because there was no better place to lay your head. It made the parlor floor, snoring Mémé an arm’s length away, seem like luxury.
Emma did not have the heart to evict the Goat that night. Nor did she have the energy. She hoisted the basket of laundry, heading into the house and the ever more appealing prospect of her pillow. The moon threw shadows across the yard, a painter expert exclusively in the palette of gray and blue.
Come morning, Emma rose before the sun to bake the Kommandant’s bread, her body hungry, her spirit fatigued. Pirate harassed her ankles while she crossed the yard. As ever, a pinch of feed purchased his silence. Working the dough roughly, she peered outside before adding straw.
The Goat was sneaking toward the barnyard door. The knapsack hung empty on his back, so he must have moved things in. He was planning to stay in the hog shed. The presumptuousness. Emma would gladly have evicted him, with a salty dose of scorn for the pleasure of it, but it was early and she could not risk waking the captain. Of all things, too, Pirate goose-stepped along beside the Goat, not crowing or attacking, but clucking and bobbing his head.
The world was a mystery which each day slid further from Emma’s understanding. Was she supposed to help the Goat, along with everyone else? The wants of her fellow villagers were like the ocean, miles wide and the other side beyond sight. Emma already had all she could handle with Mémé, her own hunger, the Kommandant’s infernal bread. Didier was one person too many. Or perhaps he offered a convenient receptacle for her frustration at being overwhelmed. She rushed through the barnyard door, catching him by the eastern well. “What do you think you are doing?”
Didier had reached the rise of hedgerow across the way. He paused there, glancing back at her and at the path ahead.
“Don’t think about running off,” she continued. “Or I’ll take your mess from the hog shed and throw it down the well.”
“That would be a fragrant little chore, wouldn’t it?” He skipped down the embankment toward her. “With the pig memories so strong in that place?”
“How can you bear to sleep in that stench?”
“I rest easily in any room the enemy ignores. And your captain—”