Emma detested the occupying army’s language, which sounded to her as though it were created solely to give commands. Whenever soldiers conversed in her vicinity, she thought they were either gargling or preparing to spit. Sometimes she knew from their eyes that the words were lewd; lust sounds the same in every tongue. Hearing a man in uniform now speak her language, and fluidly, Emma was dumbfounded. Forget that she had scavenged flour for weeks to do that day’s baking, forget that her grandmother was hungry. She obeyed, marching across the barnyard with a loaf fresh from the oven.
The Kommandant demanded a taste. She held the baguette toward him. He took it, immediately juggling the bread hand to hand, blowing on his fingers, then giving it to his aide to hold. As the junior officer used the gloves to protect his hands, Emma smiling inwardly at her enemies’ softness, the Kommandant composed himself. After a moment he tore one end from the loaf.
“At home we call this ‘the pope’s nose,’” he said, waving the snout of the baguette in the air. It was huge, a pig’s portion. He bit hard with his perfect white teeth. Chewing so that his cheek muscles flexed, the Kommandant looked into the distance, as though trying to remember something.
“Excellent,” he proclaimed after a moment. “You people certainly have a knack.” He turned to his aide, speaking in their harsh tongue for half a minute before facing Emma again. “I told him to establish a flour ration for mademoiselle, first quality. And to order that you proceed here unmolested by our men. They can be eager sometimes. Henceforth you will bake twelve baguettes daily for the officers’ mess.”
The aide made a note on a paper, and off they drove, still holding the remainder of the loaf.
How had Emma become so accomplished, able to bake with scant rations and yet produce a scent enticing enough to stop an army, having never ventured ten kilometers from the place where she was born?
Ten years earlier, when Emmanuelle was as thin as a willow switch, Mémé had marched her past the barnyard wall, beyond the eastern well, up the lane to the village green, and into the shop of Uncle Ezra. A little bell rang as the door closed behind them. The place was warm and smelled of yeast.
“I’ve brought you an apprentice,” Mémé declared.
Ezra Kuchen had no relations nearby, did not socialize, never joined the rest of the villagers in Sunday Mass at St. Agnes by the Sea. Still, he made the most splendid sticky cinnamon rolls each year on Christmas Day, one for every child in Vergers. From wedding cakes to funeral pastries, no one else would do. Despite his gruff manner, therefore, over the decades he had become family to the townspeople, and thus Uncle.
Now the mole-faced man glanced up from the counter where he was portioning dough into penny loaves, and in less than a second had focused again on his work. “No girls.”
As if hired to prove the point, two young men labored away behind him. Emma observed one operating a giant mixer—the metal churning arm turned at a speed she would have slowed to avoid drying out the dough. The other portioned flour, cup by cup, into a large metal bowl—not noticing the slight spill he committed each time. Neither interrupted his work to see who had entered the store.
Mémé dug in her sack, producing a pie tin. She set it on the shelf, slid away the cover, and broke off a piece of crust. “Taste.”
Scowling, Uncle Ezra waddled out from behind the counter. Up close, his brow bore beads of perspiration. He took the crust, sniffed it, then popped it in his mouth. He chewed thoughtfully, then slowed. “You made this, Mémé? You’re improving.”
For reply, she gestured with one hand. Emmanuelle, freckled and twelve, curtsied.
“Is that so?” Uncle Ezra crossed his arms. “Then how did you cause it to flake so lightly? Answer me quick.”
“Olive oil with the butter, sir. I melted them together first.”
“Bah. How much?”
“Two thimbles, sir.”
“Heresy,” he muttered. But he reached for another taste.
That was hundreds of baguettes ago, thousands. Seasons had passed, whole years. End to end, the loaves Emma had baked for her enemies would have stretched from her barn through the village to the beach, into the sea, across the salty sleeve of water, all the way to the island kingdom where the mighty Allies smoked cigars and made speeches about courage and did not come.
Now, adding wood to the fire, Emma divided the dough for that fifth day of June into fourteen portions. She spread flour on the counter and began kneading the rounds into the long and slender baguette shape. Faintly she heard a whistling from outside, the high wandering melody that issued perpetually from the puckered lips of Monkey Boy. He would be stopping at the eastern well, just outside Emma’s barnyard wall, for his morning drink. Monkey Boy’s given name was Charles, but at birth he had been touched by God, was only half sensible, and preferred to spend his days in the trees.
Emma wondered what would happen to Monkey Boy when he turned eighteen. His father was long gone; his mother despaired of so much as keeping the boy washed. Thus far, all he had demonstrated the capacity to do was sell apples, most of which the villagers purchased out of pity. The orchards in that region were solely cultivated for Calvados brandy, crushed in the fall and distilled in winter and far too bitter to eat, but somehow he had found a few trees whose fruit was edible. This discovery was no qualification for laboring far from home in the occupying army’s factories. Would the enemy conscript him to work there anyway, as they had Emma’s beloved Philippe? Or would they declare him useless, and dispose of him as they had so many others? Monkey Boy’s sixteenth birthday was in mid-August, not ten weeks away, and there was no chance the war would be over in two years. Not when it had already raged for four. Probably it would never end. So let him whistle and wander. It did no harm, and a short life might as well be a merry one.
Emma eased the loaves into the oven, fourteen pale babies swaddled in a skin of water to make a crisp crust, using her thumbnail to mark the underside of each one in the shape of a V. May you break a tooth on it, she whispered.
No one knew where the Vs began, or precisely what they meant. But for anyone with eyes open, they were as common as stones: carved into the public benches, scribbled on the chalkboards of summer’s empty classrooms, scuffed in the dirt outside the town offices. The occupying army saw, and announced that V meant victory, their mighty triumph. They put it on giant flags, flown high. By attempting to make V their own, however, they had no idea of the extent to which they committed an act of self-mockery. Proper Vs did not occur on flags or grand displays, but in secret and only among those who knew: matchbooks left on a café table, folded into a V. Driftwood piled upon the beach. Books standing open on their spines. Vs everywhere, little sprouting flowers of undiminished will.