She started down the aisle with bread in her hand. Where could she leave the loaf so that no one would see it but the priest? She reached the front pews, hearing the rumble of another bomb, but the side chapel was quiet and the door to the sacristy in back stood open an uninviting inch. Women were not permitted in that area anyway.
At last her eyes came to rest on the proper spot: inside the Communion rail, where the faithful knelt to receive the sacrament. None but the Monsignor was allowed within that rail.
Emma considered what she held: one third of a loaf, perhaps less. The moment the priest noticed it, he would know that she had committed a misdeed, by entering where she was forbidden. He would also know that Emma had answered his demands of her. Nor did she worry about mice; a church was no ark. It contained food too infrequently to sustain inhabitants however small or meek.
Perhaps that was one of the flaws of the faith: life’s pleasures were all sins, as if the senses were the enemy of the spirit, the body its soul’s adversary. The villagers used to worry about such things, argue about them, weigh them in their consciences, but only in the time before. Once the occupation began, pleasures became too simple and rare to consider them sins: a decent night’s sleep, a taste of wine not turned to vinegar, a slice of boiled pork eaten without the army finding out. Emma stood at the center of the church, trying not to become angry. If these were sins, damnation was hereby invited to the table.
She opened the gate in the rail, the one the priest used when he came forward to baptize a newborn, to shake holy water on a casket, to brandish the incense snifter back and forth before the congregation, a cloud of scented smoke passing over their heads and upward. Emma hastened to the front, and without pause or ceremony left the bread in the center of the altar. Then she quit the place at a run, before God or anyone could catch her.
Chapter 26
The meaning of Planeg’s finger became clear when Emma had pulled the wagon past the crossroads and saw, there at the roadside, the lieutenant’s motorcycle. He had left the gas cap on the seat so that anyone—a passerby, a stranger, a commanding officer wanting to know why his lieutenant was impermissibly slow in responding to orders to report—might see for themselves the reason for the machine’s abandonment.
Emma peered into the tank: as dry as the inside of an oven, the fumes sharp like the memory of a moment of shame.
A cascade of realizations came to her one by one: Planeg having to walk all the way to his barracks, with all of that time to wonder why he had run out of fuel, recalling the woman in the bushes carrying a jug, suspecting he had been played for a fool, reconsidering his arrangement with the brittle but otherwise generally satisfactory tart in the cabin at the top of the hill, reevaluating the entire comfortable circumstance he had devised for himself for the duration of the tedious occupation.
Worse, once he had arrived, and explained the empty gas tank to his superiors, as a result of their predictable displeasure Planeg was assigned to the shovel detail, work far beneath his rank, under an officer he didn’t respect and in fact had planned one day soon to surpass. Now he would have to flood the croplands first, for a purpose no one had disclosed. Every dig of the spade into a clay as thick as the skulls of these backward rural gas thieves sharpened the lieutenant’s resentment of rank, of menial tasks, and above all of that woman with the jug, until his hands hurt and she became an emblem of misplaced trust, his arms grew sore and she was a symbol of his deception, his back ached and he was no longer an officer or even human, but some animal force distilled by frustration into a sweating, smoldering, vengeful thing.
Who should happen along at that very instant, refueled herself by recent bread and an act of generosity, but the one person responsible for putting him in that soggy ditch doing the work of privates. It seemed as if his temper had called her forth, drawing the wagon past that ditch as a magnet pulls at a pin. Planeg had pointed his rigid finger in her direction only because at that moment he chanced to be unarmed.
All of this possibility Emma understood as she placed one hand on the motorcycle seat, the leather damp yet from the day’s earlier rain. She glanced north to see Apollo the draft horse ambling up the lane, his head low as if lost in thought.
Yet Emma’s attention next turned west as she heard, and then saw, more bombers, again with their wings painted oddly white. This time, however, there was enough treeless sky for her to see that only one of the aircraft possessed that black mouth in its belly. The others were smaller and quicker, guards of some kind, darting above and beside the big one. Behind that trio came another three, close on its wake, though they did not stand out against the gray sky until they’d drawn close.
Something fell, then, some small, parachuted item swinging side to side in the air, its landing place hidden by the hedgerow half a kilometer ahead. Prompted perhaps by the continuing angers of her belly, Emma’s immediate thought was: food.
By the time the second wave passed, the thunder of the first crew’s bombs had reached where she stood. Another sound responded, not an echo but similar in volume and growl, and Emma wondered if these were the antiaircraft guns Thalheim had spoken of so proudly that day upon the bluff. Regardless, it was still her village under attack, still the railroad station that seemed to be the target. But nothing came by train anymore, and the rails had already taken away Philippe and the other conscripted men. Why were the bombers bothering now?
As quiet returned Emma continued to imagine the afternoon from Planeg’s perspective, how he disobeyed Thalheim in order to explain himself, to identify her with a righteousness that outranked rank, and how the impatient captain had squinted at her, but upon discovering the identity of the fuel thief, what pleasure it had given him. His smile had turned her stomach.
“Here,” Mémé said. She had climbed down from the wagon and tiptoed up beside her pensive granddaughter. “Watch.”
She grabbed Emma’s shoulder for balance, pulled her dress up to the knee, raised one foot against the side of the motorcycle’s seat, and shoved. The machine tipped, then toppled, falling on its side with a torqueing of handlebars and the sound of things breaking on the underside. The gas cap tumbled off its perch, rolling into the ditch and the grass below, where it came to rest somewhere out of sight.
“Home now,” Mémé said, marching to the wagon’s stern and hoisting her buttocks to drop heavily aboard. “Hungry.”
Emma considered the motorcycle, there in the ditch. Apollo arrived at her side and seemed to contemplate it, too.
“I guess we can’t get in any worse trouble,” she told the horse. “Right?”
Emma slipped her arms back into the harnesses, which by this time had formed the leather into the exact shape of her pulling body. Leaning toward home, she started the wagon rolling, planning a route that would keep her on as level a terrain as possible, all the way to the barnyard gate.