“The Allies are fighting an intelligent war,” Guillaume said. He had a low, calm voice. “It is all quite deliberate. The fuel for our enemy’s trucks and tanks comes by rail, for example, and many of the tracks are now destroyed.”
No one asked how he knew such things. Since membership in the Resistance was a capital offense, and since the occupying army mandated that villagers report anyone suspected of belonging, likewise on a threat of execution for failing to do so, not asking was a combination of impeccable manners and self-preservation.
In a rural village, moreover, few people were more trusted than a veterinarian. A sick cow could mean disaster for a small farm. The man who came at any hour and stopped the illness, preventing it from spreading to the herd, saved lives. While a physician must understand the human body in great detail, a veterinarian must have comparable knowledge about horses, pigs, goats, dogs. As a young man, Guillaume had even traveled all the way to Ghent, attending for two full years its eminent school for the health of livestock.
Guillaume had famous hands—giant and strong, yet capable of acts of astonishing delicacy—which the villagers had seen deliver a breached calf, resuscitate a lifeless piglet, and remove the worst of boils from the eye of a retriever. They had also watched those hands dispatch an animal beyond saving, the deed done with compassionate speed.
Beyond those credentials, Guillaume accepted payment in whatever currency a farmer possessed: money, food, gratitude. Thus not a villager questioned his knowledge of military doings.
He continued: “Those bridges were stout enough to hold tanks, which now have a nine-mile detour to reach the coast. That damaged road was the fastest way for the enemy to bring reinforcement troops to our beaches. Now there can be no counterattack.”
Guillaume drew in the dirt with a stick as he spoke, mapping and explaining, and when he finished he swept it all away with his boot.
As the group straightened, digesting the news, Emmanuelle made a declaration from her bakery doorway. “It is a fairy tale.”
Guillaume tossed the stick aside. “What is?”
“This strategy nonsense. All wishing and self-importance. We are far too small to be part of any elaborate scheme.”
“Our village, perhaps. But not our location. It is possible that an invasion here would be the tip of the Allies’ spear.”
“Then we will be impaled upon it,” she replied, stirring a moment, and speaking to her bowl. “Train tracks and bridges are diversions, to keep the occupying troops busy building defenses here, to weaken their army in the east.”
Guillaume nodded. “That may be, Emma. But how do you know these things?”
“Everyone knows. Everyone with a radio.” Emma cast her gaze down at the assembled group. People looked away or at the ground.
“The great Allied tank commander who won in Africa was seen near Calais,” she continued. “If we know this, then the invaders certainly know it. At best, we are a decoy.” She waved her spoon at the circle of them as a witch would conjure a spell. “The Allies will never rescue us. They will never come.”
“Don’t say that,” the Goat shouted, flapping the arms of his fraying coat. “You are preaching despair. You don’t know anything.”
Emma considered him a moment, then pinched her nose with her fingers and went back into the bakery. The Goat let his hands fall to his sides.
“Whichever approach they use,” she heard Guillaume say, “the Allies are preparing to win. We must be patient.”
Patient? It would have been easier for the people to hold their breath for a month. Perhaps slavery is harder for a person who has known freedom. Perhaps it does not matter.
The villagers chafed under so many rules, and found small, perhaps pathetic ways of rebelling. For example, the time of day.
The army’s home country lay in a different time zone, sixty minutes ahead. When the occupation began, the villagers were ordered to adapt. Yet without any overt collusion, they routinely arrived at events an hour late. They would claim confusion, or having been misled by the town hall clock, and the soldiers could only conclude that the people of Vergers were exceptionally stupid. No matter how emphatically the officers insisted on punctuality, or how many posters they hung about order, the villagers remained one hour out of reach.
A man could be outwardly obedient, but tardiness revealed his inner determination, proof that slavery affects only the body. It does not include possession of the heart.
The one schedule villagers did obey was distribution of meat rations. Then they became sheep. Even the strongest are humbled by hunger. Odette told everyone that it was only meat that gave bodies strength, that kept an empty stomach from gnawing at itself.
She was likeliest to know. Odette ran the town’s sole surviving café—a ten-table establishment that served locals and soldiers without discrimination. A few villagers still had cash, and Odette accepted foreign currency as well. Her supplies came from the black market, to which the soldiers turned a blind eye so long as their plates had decent portions and their glasses were filled to the brim. For locals, her prices were inflated. For the occupying army, they were rapacious.
Odette was mannish despite her prodigious bosom. Short-haired and stocky, her sleeves perpetually rolled up, she made no promises, negotiated without mercy, and bullied anyone who questioned the bill. Odette had no family, both parents dead and no siblings or spouse, so her café became home, her customers a form of kin.
The rest of the people depended on their gardens, and the occupiers’ paltry rations. Everything else, the army took for itself. The young soldiers looked ruddy and hale, while the middle commanders developed paunches from too much local Camembert. The villagers grew gaunt, meanwhile, the women’s breasts losing fullness, the men’s arms hanging flaccid.
Emma’s solution was to bake illicit bread.
Chapter 2
First she was Uncle Ezra’s washerwoman. Ranked below Albin and David, apprentices for three and two years respectively, who had never scrubbed pots with enough effort or scoured muffin tins with sufficient digging, Emma swept and carried, cleaned and dried, while Uncle Ezra ranted continuously about how, whatever she did, she had done it wrong.
“Imbecile. If you use soap in a cast-iron skillet, you scrub away years of seasoning unique to that pan. It is like burning a memoir.”
Or, on another day: “Dolt. If you use lye on a cutting board, you spoil the natural oils and render it as useless as a plank.”
Or, on another: “Numbskull. Must you let the screen door slam as though no one here has ears? Have mercy, and stop it with your heel or head or your beastly backside.”