Emma did not answer, but not out of fear or respect. Through self-possession, she was denying him whatever it was he wanted. She considered silence an eloquent form of rebellion.
Thalheim spoke her language like a mathematics textbook. But his eyes never stopped surveying the barn’s dusty interior, as if he expected to find a cannon hidden among the hay bales, a tank concealed in the chicken coop. Eventually he would tire of his own voice, climb on his motorcycle, and rattle away.
With a soldier in the house, making extra loaves required twice the cleverness. Soon, however, Emma discovered that she could tell from the barn when he had wakened because he was both noisy and vain. He shaved each morning with as much care as if he were performing surgery. He kept his fingernails pared and curved, leaving the cuttings for Emma to clean. He thought nothing of standing at the mirror for full minutes, adjusting his helmet to the perfect angle. These doings gave her time to hide whatever needed hiding.
Emma’s extra flour ration was snow white and fine, in contrast with the half-ground brown that ordinary folk had to accept. Bread became her clock, her rhythm, her means of survival. Like Scheherazade pleasing the Sultan with a new tale every night, each batch of loaves purchased Emma another day, another round of the village, two baguettes to share among the starving.
Before the occupation Emma had worn her thick locks loose, graced by a green ribbon. Philippe had loved her hair, loved loosening that ribbon. One thing she admired about him was that he played no games about love. Her role was to remain coy, and safeguard the virtue of them both. Philippe trusted her with that power, because it allowed him to make no pretense of concealing his desire.
The occupation, however, had taught Emma that wanting was dangerous. She had only to consider what had happened to Michelle. At one time she had been the village beauty, the person against whose allure adolescent Emma had most often compared herself, and always found herself wanting. Michelle had skin both smooth and radiant, hair so blond it shone white in summer. Her bosom matured early and generously, her lips were as full as fruit. As she grew up, first boys made fools of themselves around her, then teens did, then grown men. She became the village’s schoolmistress, expert in grammar, arithmetic, and deflecting the attentions of her students’ fathers.
Then Michelle took up with a junior officer in the occupying army, one Lieutenant Planeg, handsome like a gelding with icy blue eyes. Sometimes after maneuvers he directed his truck to stop by the schoolhouse, children’s faces at the windows, soldiers in the truck razzing while he stole a kiss before driving on to the garrison. That summer, when the troops took Sundays to swim in the sea, Planeg’s motorcycle could dependably be found standing outside Michelle’s cottage at the top of the knoll.
Now the villagers turned their backs on her in the rations line. Some spat on the ground as she passed. Only the priest would speak with her publicly. The working men, Philippe told Emma during an evening stroll, called her “concubine.” People worried about when school recommenced in the fall. Would parents allow their children to attend? For Emma, no comparison with Michelle would be necessary again.
Most soldiers were far less gentlemanly than Planeg, Emma knew that, too. There were rumors that a trio of them had forced several women who had been foolish enough to walk alone at night. Whatever the gossip, the women’s bruises were genuine, though that could have been the result of interrogation, or as little as a passing soldier’s bad mood. If anyone was going to ask those women what had been done to them, it would not be Emma.
Whatever the truth, rather than anticipating the loss of her maidenhood to Philippe, as Emma had imagined before the occupation, now she expected to die in the act. In wartime, beauty is a weakness. Be it by one soldier or many, sooner or later an attractive girl of twenty-two will be ground like straw.
Therefore Emma braided her hair in knots, and no longer washed her face in the morning. Yet somehow hunger had made her all the more arresting. Mémé said as much, and so often that the girl determined never to look in a mirror. She wore her grandmother’s skirts like curtains around her waist, careful to offer nothing to a soldier’s suggestible imagination.
How suggestible? Consider the Kommandant. Once he had tasted her bread and pronounced his love for it, not even straw would alter his devotion. And yet, despite her contempt for him, never had Emma wished to please a man more. As long as he and his officers feasted on pope’s noses, it enabled her to divert crumbs to her neighbors, thereby extending the string of life in that village one day longer. Thus she made the bread as fastidiously, as expertly, as possible. Emma had found a form of concubinage after all, mastering the art of satisfying a man while deceiving him.
When she was found out—and Emma never doubted that eventually she would be found out—the only question was what her punishment would be.
Chapter 7
Everyone had jumped when Captain Thalheim pulled the trigger on Uncle Ezra, but pistol fire was not unfamiliar. Before the occupation, no one would dispute it, the best shot in Vergers—and the surrounding towns as well—had been Guillaume the veterinarian. First, he was about at all hours, finding the shortest distance between a farm where he’d been treating an animal and his home, where Marie and Fleur slept. The countryside had rough hedgerows, however: a maze of brambles, webs of branches and roots, a fierce natural fence that lengthened any journey and made visiting a sick cow, or a piglet that refused to nurse, no casual jaunt. Within these tangles, trees stood dark like a sultan’s guardians—huge, mute eunuchs.
Clever villagers knew a few shortcuts, openings a farmer had cut for horse, wagon, or plow, just wide enough to give a person access to his own fields. Later Emma learned all of the openings, but until then Guillaume was the master, and it showed most in his marksmanship. He might cross a horse turnout at dusk and surprise a buck at his watering place, or skirt the edge of a wheat field at dawn and flush a covey of doves. Whether he was on foot or astride his dependable blue bicycle, out would come his swift pistol, the aim of his sure hand, the focus of his sharp eye, and the man would arrive home with breakfast or supper or a month’s good meat. He had no rival.