The Kommandant ordered a stricter curfew, which brought groans from the remaining crowd. Limited travel at night was less an oppression than an insult. When people have known free passage through their town, at all hours, under every version of moon or stars or weather, curfew announces that the place is no longer theirs.
Odette helped Marguerite down the lane to her café, to wash the wound in hot water. The crowd dispersed, Thalheim ordering people away. A group of women ushered Marie homeward, her body racked with sobbing, her daughter, Fleur, silent and a few steps behind.
All that time, the soldiers who had helped to load Guillaume’s body remained standing by, watching Marie go, giving the new widow a thorough appraisal. One of them whispered to the other, who did not reply, only stood closer and nodded in agreement.
Sometime that night, despite fences and searchlights and guards, someone poisoned all of the occupying army’s dogs. They died howling. Word spread among the villagers like a bad rash. Who had dared?
The occupying army gathered nine women at gunpoint, one for each dog, and forced them to dig a mass grave on farmland outside the village. Unused to shovels, the women needed all day for their task. No one had ever taught them how to work a spade around a stone, or where to press their heels to drive the blade deeper. Unfamiliarity with the tool made the job twice as hard.
The soldiers allowed the women no rest, so that even those with farm-hardened hands watched them grow blistered and raw. No food, no water. Toward sunset the hole in the earth was deep and wide enough. By pointing their rifles, the soldiers communicated to the women to throw the carcasses in.
In groups of four they lifted the animals by their paws, the bodies stiff and heavy. Once the dogs lay side by side, the inverse of puppies piled on one another to nurse or sleep, the soldiers ordered the women to fill the grave.
Several wept as they took up their shovels again. The job lasted into the night, past curfew, so that the gravediggers went home with a military escort. Their hands curled into themselves, brittle and dry as autumn leaves. On the march through town they could hear singing from the garrison, lusty songs from young men under a starry sky, not a care in their world.
The gravesite became known as Dog Hill, villagers by common understanding forbidding the use of that land for building houses or shops, because the dogs had caused Guillaume’s death, but as brute animals they had not deserved to die either, and the mutual wrongs typified the inhumanity of war.
Marguerite did not die that night, though it appeared as though she might well lose a leg. Odette, who could neglect the café for a day if need be, provided such medical care as she was able, while hoping the old woman’s fever would pass.
The morning after the burial, the two soldiers who had held Guillaume’s arms appeared at Marie’s door. They brought with them a friend, a redheaded corporal with his arm in a sling. When she answered the door, the corporal grabbed her braid, pulling her roughly outside toward the shed.
“Fleur,” Marie yelled, following her hair across the yard. “I order you to stay in the house. You must stay in the house.”
A few mornings later, the villagers saw that someone had stretched a rope between two trees that stood atop Dog Hill. Midway across the span, this someone had hung two broken branches knotted together to make a V. Thalheim sent marksmen to shoot the rope down, but bullets only caused the V to dance in the air. He dispatched the strapping soldier with his chain saw, and both trees came down in short order. Dog Hill was now bald. Later, Monkey Boy’s mother planted the hillside with sunflowers, their bright yellow faces following the sun all summer long.
Once Marguerite’s fever broke, she recovered quickly. She was no longer able to smuggle tobacco, however, because her supply came from a farm several kilometers from Vergers and now the older woman struggled to visit her nearest neighbors.
Emma left a mahogany cane on her doorstep, though no one knew where she had obtained such a thing. In return, Marguerite gave her small jars of lanolin to distribute among the women forced to dig Dog Hill, to ease their blisters. There was a jar for Marie, too. When Emma came to deliver it, Fleur stood in the doorway and accepted the gift on behalf of her mother, who did not emerge from the house’s dark interior to say either thank you or hello. Emma was not sure if she heard whimpering from within, or only imagined it.
Chapter 17
Darkness lasted months in Vergers, a melancholy that infected each person, all moods, every leaf in the hedgerows. When the light returned, it took the unexpected form of a nighttime butchering.
The pig was Emma’s crowning achievement, everyone agreed, the pinnacle of her cunning. In a single night she fed the village, outfoxed the army, and concealed the conspiracy so well, by morning everyone insisted that the pig had never existed.
The incident began with two corporals on an off-duty lark, one skilled with a repeating-fire rifle, one determined to learn the use of that weapon, and both of them drunk as lords on Calvados purchased at an absurdly overpriced cost from Odette’s café. Dark came so late to the north country, especially in the height of spring, that it was still mild daylight when they brought the gun out to the hedgerows for target practice.
Emma happened to be wheeling her cart homeward, unable to ignore her stomach’s growls of hunger, and she passed the drunken soldiers with her head down to discourage conversation. Occasionally she wondered what she looked like, bowed low and pulling that wagon. She imagined herself as something ancient, an archetype of all women during all occupations, dragging along the weight of survival just as women had pulled similar carts with comparable contents and identical reasons, for as long as human nature had led men to make war, which is to say as long as there was history.
The first corporal, thin as a whip, instructed his stouter fellow junior officer, pointing at components of the weapon with the tip of his cigarette. Though he spoke a different language, Emma could tell that his words were slurred. She slowed behind them, with the growing feeling that something—drunkards, a gun, a pleasant evening—was about to go horribly wrong.
The corporal moved a switch on the gun and raised it to his eye. “Bums,” he said, jerking the rifle as though it had fired. His arms moved in an arc, a pantomime of using one shot to see where the next should go. “Bumgens, bums.”
The other corporal, the larger one, asked a question, and Emma listened as the thin one answered at great length, holding the gun to the side, the other hand on his hip. Was there a tone of superiority in that garble?