Emma left the wagon at the foot of the knoll, to spare herself the effort of hauling it up to Michelle’s door. She had no eggs to hide in the tree, had not visited her chicks yet. Nor did she expect to siphon fuel that day, since the lieutenant was probably battling the invasion. Still she felt compelled to complete her rounds, to maintain the pretense that life was unchanged, and to enable Thalheim to find her. Then he might do as he would without hurting Mémé.
The hill proved too steep, and Emma paused halfway to rest against a linden tree. It was in bloom, the fragrance that surrounded her sweet but musky, a fecund contradiction of the deathly pounding coming from the beaches and the smoky scent everywhere else.
Her ear hurt, her throat, the whole left side of her face. Her right wrist throbbed where the small bones had fractured. She held her splinted hand high to keep blood from adding to its swelling. When it became too heavy, Emma lowered her arm and pushed on. Only then did she notice that the cottage’s blue door stood wide. Something was nailed to it, too. A squirrel? The tail of a fox?
“Michelle,” she called, drawing nearer. “Mademoiselle?”
There was no reply. Emma reached the dooryard and saw what hung on the door: a ponytail. A long clump of human hair, precisely the color of Michelle’s.
Emma leaned into the open doorway. “Hello?”
The kitchen was a shambles, chairs tipped over, broken glasses and plates. On the counter sat a pair of farm shears, as one would use to cut wool from a lamb. On the floor, clumps of hair drifted here and there in the breeze.
“Michelle? Are you all right?”
Still no answer, and Emma grew bold, venturing into the other downstairs room: a settee, a chair by the fire, a footstool. Despite her aches she decided to climb the stairs, the wood complaining under her weight until she reached the landing. One bedroom was plush as for a wealthy person, a four-post bed with sheer linens draped on its frame, a deep mattress and many small pillows. Long gloves and lace things lay tossed on chair backs. All around the room there were candles burned to various heights, perhaps a dozen of them.
When Emma was fifteen Uncle Ezra had taught her reduction, boiling a full pot of beef or chicken stock down to a quarter cup of spectacular concentrated flavor. Now she understood that there was another kind of reduction, and she had allowed it to happen to her: living made small, a way of life diminished and humiliated. Considering the one candle by whose light she and Mémé ate dinner every night, sharing their one egg and fraction of a baguette, Emma marveled that Michelle had managed to create this room of luxury.
As if to complete Emma’s thought, the other upstairs room was spare, a pink vanity with a small, matching metal seat. She sat, studying all of the powders and creams, admiring them. Tools of seduction, these artifacts of deception, and her ignorance of such things caused Emma to chuckle.
Then she made the mistake of looking up. The face that confronted her in the mirror was none she had seen before. The entire left side was bruised from throat to hairline. Her lips were misshapen, the lower one split. Her eye was swollen nearly shut, though she mused that it appeared worse than it felt. Her chin bore a cut that had scabbed hard.
Emma spoke to the woman in the glass: “Good God, you are ugly.” The woman told her the same thing.
She picked up a brush and a dish of powder, patting a bit on her left cheek. The bruise remained as visible as ever. She selected a lipstick: red as an embarrassment, red as a wolf lifting his mouth from a fresh kill. She ran the smooth stick across her lips, but it hurt to apply pressure.
That pain broke all reverie. This was nonsense and indulgence. Emma wiped her sleeve roughly across her mouth; it stung but she did it again till all the lipstick was gone. She licked her fingers and swept the powder from her cheek as well. The stairs seemed louder on the way down.
Emma stood by the door, considering what the cut hair meant, what kind of retribution it signified. She wondered who in the village had done this. How would that person feel to know that the fish he or she had eaten the day before was caught by Yves because of fuel Emma stole thanks to Michelle’s romance with a lieutenant? It was an awkward irony: After this long an occupation, could anyone say they were entirely unimplicated?
Emma gimped down to the wagon. The battle burned at the edge of her vision, a thunder of shelling from offshore. Every noise, she knew it in her battered bones, meant that someone was dying.
The Allies had invaded after all. Emma had never been gladder to be wrong. But if they lost—given that elsewhere a single dead occupying soldier resulted in thirty villagers shot—she figured the entire village could expect execution. If they won, the battle of the beaches would move inland, and every home and barnyard would become a tactical objective, a thing to be fought over. Either way, the bloodshed was barely beginning.
She slid into her harnesses, body aching, mind alternating between clouded and clear, and trudged on like an animal hardened to its chores. From a distance it may have appeared as though the wagon was pushing her.
Emma lifted her head, only to see sun pouring through the clouds over the ocean. Great bright beams from sky to sea; as a girl, she had always called that sight God. What should she call it now? The moment that question arrived, she realized that no one had sent for the Monsignor to collect Didier the Goat with his wheelbarrow. The poor man lay in her barnyard, unfuneraled, unmourned. Emma knew where she needed to go next.
In the middle of a hedgerow near the village she spied something dangling from a tree. It was just above Dog Hill, the grass June-smooth, the sunflowers only a foot high. When she cleared the shortcut she saw that the something was a person, hung up by his parachute perhaps twenty feet from the ground, the easiest target an occupying army could ask for.
The paratrooper had been shredded with bullets. His head hung as if he had no neck bones. One of his legs remained attached only by a thin band of muscle. As he swung in the wind, the soldier’s leg moved with a delay: The body turned away, then the leg. The body turned back, then the leg.
Emma staggered sideways at the horror of it. Or was she weakened by hunger? She could not recall the last time she had eaten. But the day was advancing without regard for her. She pressed against the straps and trudged toward the village.