The Baker's Secret(80)
The soldiers parted, a form stumbled forward. It was Argent, the young professor from the mansion on the bluff. His glasses were gone, his face lacerated on one side. Emma looked beyond, but there was no one else with him.
Though she had never learned his wife’s name, Emma felt the loss like a blow. And the baby, barely a day old. Before she could offer comfort, though, or say anything, the infant mewed in her father’s arms. He was carrying the newborn after all.
“Ha!” Emma cried, clapping her hands once. The soldiers turned to peer at her, and she seemed equally surprised. What was this rush of emotion? Was it actually a glimmer of optimism? In spite of everything, the child was alive.
“Baby,” Mémé said. She scurried to the house’s doorway, waving an arm to invite them inside. “Baby.”
The young professor turned in the direction of that voice, stumbling into the house, and in his weary arms a bundle of warm cloth: the pink-skinned girl whose nappie needed changing, who needed to nurse but would never nurse again, whose exhaustion had overwhelmed all of her other wants so that she slept even though war raged around her, eyes closed as if instead of chaos and violence the world were a quiet nursery.
Although months of conflict remain, at a cost of thousands of lives, this very second is the moment that the war begins to end, the time that the future commences.
The baby girl, Gabrielle, will not grow up with memories of occupation and invasion. Her childhood and adolescence will contain a treasury of hours—with Emma at bedtime, in Odette’s café, playing in the hayloft while Pierre milks his girls—of hearing the story: who survived and how, who outsmarted whom, which people sacrificed and how much.
Their stories were like a cemetery in the mind, naming the dead, mourning what was lost. But they also made a chapel in the imagination, proof that the people were strong enough to endure. Catalog of triumph, relic of redemption; story was souvenir, salve, and salvation.
Gabrielle divined this insight only after the war had ended, however, after the villagers had experienced the merciful tincture of time. On that gusty June night—blood on their clothes, hunger in their bellies, aching in their hearts—the people’s future remained a frightening unknown. Gunfire clattered in the distance, a thudding of mortars. Soldiers prepared for battle in the dark. The smell of gunpowder arrived on the wind.
Who should swagger into the barnyard just then, but Pirate. Feathers scorched and disheveled, he strutted before the soldiers undaunted, crowing at them in full volume: get out of his barnyard, get away from his roost. The men laughed.
One soldier said something in his language to the captain, who made a firm reply, and the laughter stopped.
“What did he ask?” Emma said.
“If he should shoot him,” Schwartz answered. “I said that scrappy little guy is actually part of what we’re here to save.”
Then he cleared his throat and called orders. The men assembled, checking their equipment one last time. Captain Schwartz turned to Emma. “Here. Something to remember us by.” He handed her a hard square of foil.
“As if I’m likely to forget,” she answered.
“Okay, men,” the captain shouted. “Let’s march.” He strode through the barnyard door, soldiers filing behind him, their bodies hunched and rifles raised.
After the last of them had passed beyond the eastern well, into the hedgerow and out of sight, Emma found herself standing alone. Hell on earth continued all around: flames on the horizon, bombers snarling overhead, people inside the house awaiting her help. But for that brief interval the barnyard was an oasis, a private moment of calm. It felt vaguely familiar, as if from a long, long time ago.
Here was the place Philippe would return to, and bit by bit recover with the help of a woman as steady as rock, and find himself healed by the joyous, exhausting duties of fathering. Here was the place that the future lived.
With her good hand Emma unwrapped the foil around the captain’s gift. Chocolate, a fat square of it, and she immediately bit off a chunk. After all those years of eating sparely, she felt her mouth flooded with flavor: rich, milky, sweet.
The taste of hope.