“You have no use for bread? You are the first person to turn aside any food I have offered.”
“Please don’t think us ungrateful, but I am sure someone else can enjoy it. For myself, I eat only what my mother will eat. And, no offense intended, she trusts no food other than eggs.”
“Why is that?”
Fleur answered in a whisper, “The shell.” She glanced left and right, then leaned forward. “It means no one has entered it. It has not been poisoned. Only an egg is safe.”
Emma felt a pain in her chest. She would gladly have offered the girl the entire contents of her cart, if they were not already promised to others. But she did a bit of mental math: if she gave the girl two eggs, there would still be one left to share with Mémé. Scrambled with herbs—atop the third of a loaf Emma had learned months earlier to leave at home, to prevent herself from giving everything away on her rounds—that would suffice for a day. Besides, if any female was to carry the lineage of their people forward, it would not be the one whose life had become utilitarian, like an ox under the yoke. It was this young one’s task to create the next generation of beauty.
“Wait,” Emma said. She pulled another egg from her bag. “Take this. You need it more than anyone else.”
Fleur’s eyes went wide. “Two eggs, miss? You give us two?”
“From now on. Whenever I can, that is.”
There was a murmur from within and the girl turned her face. “One minute, Mama.” She curtsied to Emma, which was awkward in the narrow doorway and with one hand still in her pocket. “I am so grateful. And I hope you can find some hungry villager who needs that bread.”
Emma slipped on the harnesses. “It will not be difficult.”
Chapter 25
As the fifth of June reached high afternoon, and Mémé slept like an innocent in the back of the wagon, Emma passed soldiers digging in the stream beside Pierre’s fields. She could not imagine why. There was no drainage problem, and the property possessed no military value. Perhaps the work was disciplinary, she speculated, because the clay of that region was heavy on the shovel.
Then Emma saw: across the stretch of planted wheat, pale new stalks poking out of the dirt like the fingers of children playing in mud, the river appeared to have backed up somehow. It spilled over the banks though the day’s rains had been lighter than expected. But in regular floods—the kind nature inflicts periodically and without mercy, scouring the fields, snatching cows, and leaving homes ruined with mildew and mud—people built dikes or dams to stop the seepage. These soldiers were shoveling hard, almost with urgency, their shirts dark with sweat, to accomplish the opposite. Emma watched them open a sluice from the stream to the field, creating a path for the water.
This was worse than switching road signs. This was using nature as a tool of propaganda. Pierre’s field would become a pond, but to what purpose? Who would be deceived, and for what benefit? Whoever spent his days devising false road signs had reached another level. Now he was using the landscape to lie.
One of the diggers straightened. The officer in charge brayed at him, some harsh, back-to-work command. But the man with the spade did not obey. Instead he straightened his arm, pointing past the officer, his finger aimed directly at Emma. It was an accusation, though of what she had no idea.
But when his commanding officer snapped at him again, the sweaty, muddy digger puffed up his chest like a rooster. All at once she recognized him: Lieutenant Planeg, who had seen her at Michelle’s at noontime as he sped past on his motorcycle. Clearly he remembered, since he answered sharply to the officer, who turned to follow where that finger pointed. It was Thalheim, whose expression changed from crimped annoyance to a steady, cold smile. Thirty meters away, Emma felt the chill of it in her bones. She turned her cart homeward. Her mouth was dry, tasting of worry.
An hour later in her rounds, hunger overtook Emma. One glass of Calvados with Odette when dropping off the lobster was not enough fuel. The pangs became unbearable, the remaining distance to home too great, the weight of Mémé in the back too much. She had to eat something.
Emma braked the wagon, slid the harnesses down, and turned to dig out the half baguette that Fleur had declined. Too famished to slice a piece off, she bit hard into the loaf and ripped.
Mémé stirred. “Gypsy?” She rose on one arm. “Gypsy?”
With a mouth barely able to produce enough saliva for her to swallow, Emma offered the loaf to Mémé. The old woman turned her face sideways, using her good teeth to gnaw off a portion. Chewing in silence, she handed the loaf back.
In that moment, with those few bites of food, Emma’s mind cleared and she knew where she stood: at the foot of the steps leading into St. Agnes by the Sea. Was this where her day of effort was to end, then, on the fifth of June with the rain done and her rounds almost completed, and in the distance the drone of an approaching aircraft?
There was no sign of activity in the church itself, no noise from the rectory across the way. Just that airplane, now loud enough that Emma squinted at the sky and discovered there were two. And then three, three large aircraft coming from the north. Well, and so what? They flew from the north all the time, on their way to more important targets. What need had she of worry? The day already had provided more than enough.
The planes passed overhead lower than usual, so that Emma could see their wings were painted white. A black mouth opened in the metal underside of the lead aircraft. Emma continued to watch, the note of their engines bending downward as they arced away, until that dark mouth spat out an aluminum tooth, roughly above the rail station, tumbling over itself as it fell.
Seconds later the air rang. Something different happened to the trees: they swayed in a way that was not wind. Air-raid sirens began whining, but they sounded different. The airplanes were not passing over this time. They were bombing the village.
Emma felt seized by the desire to be home, absolutely as soon as possible. One more chore and day was done. She tore another chunk off the baguette and handed it to Mémé, then jogged up the church steps wishing that her stomach would enjoy the bread it had received, instead of what felt like wrestling with it. She pulled the handle of the church door, entering to the gentle scent of incense.
Emma heard the bombers passing again, low and bold, not bothering to conceal themselves, but then the door eased closed and she was stilled by the silence. Dim daylight filtered through stained glass. The pews were empty, the pulpit bare. As always, a single candle burned beside the altar.