The Baker's Secret(75)

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.