The Baker's Secret
Stephen P. Kiernan
To Ellen Levine and Jennifer Brehl
in gratitude
Epigraph
It takes twenty years to bring man from his vegetable state inside the womb . . . to the stage where he begins to grow into maturity. It took thirty centuries to learn something about his structure. It would take an eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes only an instant to kill him.
—Voltaire, 1764
Men are not made for war. But neither are they made for slavery.
—Jean Guéhenno, 1942
Part One
Bread
Chapter 1
All through those years of war, the bread tasted of humiliation.
For as long as their nation had possessed a history, the residents of Vergers village had been a people of pleasure, devoted to the senses without shame, and none savored more unapologetically than those of the kitchen. Over a span of centuries, their culture had turned the routine animal act of feeding themselves into an art form. Delectable breakfast morsels with steaming coffee as dark as mud, calming lunches in the shade when haste is the enemy and cheese is the dessert, dinners luxurious, candlelit, and lasting hours—such was the rhythm of their days: Who has a story to tell, and shall we place some flowers on the table?
It did not matter that they lived in a tiny village a kilometer from the chilly northern ocean, their occupations either of the farm or of the sea. If anything, the labors of manure and milking, mending nets or hauling them, only intensified their love of flavor, patience, the company of friends. Therefore the baking of bread, a nearly daylong alternation between active kneading of dough and passive waiting for it to rise, could be as gratifying as deep breathing. In the hearth of the oven, where baguettes basked side by side, making loaves echoed making love.
Then came the occupying army to teach their senses other lessons: the clack that boot heels make when snapped together at attention, the dull smell of a rifle after the barrel has been oiled. For some, this instruction included a comparatively milder discovery—that even the most pleasing kitchen task, when it is made compulsory, becomes tedious.
Consider Emmanuelle: lovely, gifted in the kitchen, a fawn of twenty-two years. In any other time, the modest bakery where she was employed would serve as a center of commerce and community. In another era she would be distracted, preparing sweets for her Philippe, or taking all day to boil chicken stock down to a reduction so potent with concentrated flavor it could cast spells, all while dreaming of the drape of her someday bridal dress.
Instead, she rose before dawn that day, the fifth of June, to the crowing of her rooster, a belligerent strutting shouter widely known and universally disliked, whose name was Pirate because of the dark patch around one eye. Having slept on the floor beside the couch on which her grandmother now snored, Emma folded her quilt, tucked it away, and tiptoed from the parlor without waking the aged woman or causing the occupying army’s captain to stir upstairs. Slipping into her shoes by the threshold, Emma strode with purpose across the barnyard. Pirate charged after her in full lecture—his hens, his morning, his territory—until she found a pinch of feed in her pocket and tossed it by the path, winning his silence long enough for her to reach the baking shed.
Emma stirred somnolent coals in the brick oven her father had built, tossing in chestnut shells for kindling, giving the ashes a single long breath until they glowed awake and the shells crackled. Then began the tedium, the task the Kommandant had ordered her to perform seven days a week, as though she were a cow with milk to be wrung from her straining udder at morning and eve, or a chicken whelping one new egg per turn of the earth. With each passing day Emma’s love of baking grew a fraction drier, till what had once been her greatest joy dwindled to barely a husk.
She lifted cheesecloth from several bowls on the side table and studied the dough risen there like white globes. Satisfied with what she saw, Emma punched the rounds, each one contracting with a clean yeasty sigh. Only then, and after a glance out the opening to reconfirm that Pirate was the sole creature stirring, she reached behind a hanging cloth into a bin, five times returning with a handful of golden powder that she sprinkled onto the dough.
Straw. Ground fine each day to supplement the batter. Containing no nutrition whatsoever, its sole purpose was to add bulk. Thus were the rations of flour she received to make twelve loaves daily for the Kommandant and his men enlarged to produce fourteen, two of which she would secret away to divide among her neighbors and whoever in the village was in direst need.
There was never enough. There would never be enough.
Each morning required every crumb of Emma’s skills, all of her artifice, to bake loaves containing straw and have neither the Kommandant nor his officers notice. Yet this was only one of five hundred deceits, all conceived during the long strain of the occupation. She learned to sow a minefield and reap eggs. She could wander the hedgerows pulling a rickety cart, and the result would be maps. She could turn cheese into gasoline, a lightbulb into tobacco, fuel into fish. She could catch, butcher, and divide among the villagers a pig that later every person who had tasted it would insist had never existed. And all of these achievements would occur in a land of violence and slavery and oppression.
In a time of humiliation, the only dignified answer is cunning.
It began fittingly, with aroma. One morning three years earlier, when a stalled tank had blocked the paved road down the coast, the Kommandant instructed his driver to use the dirt lane that ran west from the village. Between low tide and the offshore wind, the air that day smelled sour and foul. But as the officer’s staff car passed Emmanuelle’s barnyard, the scent of baking loaves rose to him like a cloud of comfort. Ordering his driver to reverse, the Kommandant sat with closed eyes until the dust had settled. Then he stepped down from the passenger side, removing his leather gloves one finger at a time. He handed them to his driver and strolled forward.
“What is that glorious smell? You, by that oven. Come forward.”