The Baker's Secret(43)
Emma swallowed audibly. “Like a machine.”
Thalheim put his hands on his hips, smoke from the cigarette in his mouth causing him to squint. “Right now the Field Marshal is ordering for 88s to be presighted, for maximum lethality. Rather than calculating a shot, gunners will use those wooden posts—you see? there in sand?—to know their range in advance. They wait for target to enter their sights. Then they destroy.”
Emma noticed that Thalheim had never spoken her language with greater fluency. His chest was puffed out, his head high.
“This is entirely horrifying,” she managed to say at last.
“You begin to understand. I pray your Allies attack here, the more to our greater glory. This is the place our enemy commits an extravagant suicide.”
He waited, thumbs hooked in his belt. “For one time the smart miss has nothings to say to Captain Thalheim?”
“They will never come,” she answered. “Sergeant.”
He raised a hand as if to strike her, but an exclamation from his right interrupted the impulse.
“Exzellent,” the Field Marshal was proclaiming, his mouth full and his words spewing crumbs. “Exzellent.”
The Kommandant broke into a huge smile. Emma thought it looked like he had peed himself with relief.
The Field Marshal waved one hand in a circle—a magnanimous gesture she recognized from Odette’s café as signifying that the person will buy a round for the house, but which in this case the aides and guard understood to mean that they should distribute the rest of the bread among everyone under the canopy. Thalheim ground out his cigarette and bulled past, Emma’s impudence forgotten as he muscled toward the Kommandant to receive his share.
The young guard handed away the two loaves in his hand, then waved Emma over. She weaseled through the men, all large and wearing bulky foul-weather gear, to hand him the canvas sack. He tried to pull out a baguette, but it was too long to remove completely with his gun in the same hand.
He glanced to the side, spotted a table covered with maps, and leaned his rifle against it. Then he turned and began working his way forward through the crowd of officers, holding baguettes up so that they could tear portions off for themselves.
First, Emma felt relief. The fact of fourteen loaves was forgotten, the straw undetected. But as the men began eating, laughing and jostling one another, comparing the size of their portions of bread and bragging if they’d received a larger one, she experienced a second realization: they had forgotten her.
Emma was female, one of the local people, too weak to be feared, too small to notice. So sure were the men of their power, she had become invisible. No one was looking, no one protecting. Meanwhile the young guard’s rifle leaned against a table not two steps from her right leg.
Emma had never fired a gun before. She could remember holding one on three occasions: once assisting Philippe when he bagged a deer and wanted to dress it where it fell, and twice when her father had managed to shoot a rabbit in spite of his bad eyesight, and needed both hands to put the carcass in his hunting sack. But she also remembered the lesson the drunk corporal had been giving to his friend when they accidentally shot the pig that never existed. It was a matter of aiming and squeezing, and using the impact of one shot to decide where the next should go.
She lifted her gaze. As if by design the men had lined up for her, left to right: Thalheim, the Kommandant, the Field Marshal, the officer with the pencil-thin mustache. Here stood every one of the men that she wanted to die. Forget the knife on her thigh. It was messy and slow and she would be overpowered. One grab of the rifle, however, one lift to her shoulder, one long squeeze on that trigger, and she would lay them low.
Nothing could stop her, until it was too late.
Of course the other officers, after a stunned moment, would annihilate her, a dozen guns, a hundred bullets, her existence blasted upon the bluff above where she had played childhood games and learned to swim and sometimes strolled with Philippe for romance. But then, what better place? It would happen too quickly for her to feel pain. All she needed to do was seize it: the gun, her destiny, the opportunity, and she would change the course of history. All she needed to do.
Yet Emma did not act. The scene of slaughter replayed itself in her mind, the power of it, the certainty of success, while her arms hung dully at her sides. Despite years of occupation and oppression, despite the deaths of people she loved, still her desire for revenge remained frozen. Emma genuinely wanted those men to die, but she lacked the capacity to kill.
The moment passed. The young guard returned to collect his weapon, handing Emma the empty canvas sack with no idea of the danger that had passed. The officers recommenced their tasks, arguing over maps or attending to the Field Marshal, while Emma thought of Uncle Ezra, of Guillaume, of Philippe and her father and the others taken away, of the many villagers who had shown so much courage, and knew with lacerating shame that she herself possessed none.
Thalheim swaggered back, speaking with his mouth full. “I’ll grant you have talent in bread, but our nation’s rule will last one thousand years. What do you say to that?”
“I think you are probably right,” Emma said, the first words she had uttered to him without bite in her voice. “I think that from here on, everything that happens to me, I deserve.”
As she spoke a gust of wind swept in from the east, driving rain under the canopy so that the officers turned away. The air also caught Emma’s umbrella, snatched it tumbling across the bluff.