Emma turned, and saw the end of the world. A ship larger than any floating thing she had seen before, ten times the length of Yves’s fishing boat, listed in the sand, fire bellowing from its middle. Tanks pointed nose first into the beach, their rumps in the air. An airplane, one of its wings missing, perched on its tail as if a giant had planted it. Trucks with stars on their rooftop canvas lay on their sides, or stood stationary with all doors wide. Different hues of smoke rose here and there, light gray to darkest black, some of it so thick she could not tell what was burning.
More than anything, though, Emma saw bodies. They lay in all sorts of positions, clustered at the waterline and here and there all over the beach. None of them were moving. A group of soldiers waded in the surf, collecting more bodies and towing them by one limb or another onto the beach, where still other soldiers hoisted them to lie in a row like a makeshift morgue. A man with a clipboard inspected each new body as it arrived, then made a note on his papers.
From down the beach she could hear machine-gun fire, the sip-sip sound bullets made when they entered the sand. A cluster of men dispatched toward the shooting, throwing grenades and using flamethrowers, until the machine gun stopped.
Other men rolled out tracks of wire mesh, a makeshift road on which the few trucks still working now made their way. She heard fighting at one of the beach exits, but it was too far to see. Emma could tell, however, that the Atlantic Wall which Thalheim had been so proud of, those four years of work, had not held the Allies off for more than half a day. How many bodies it had required, though, how many young men to prove a fanatic wrong.
Emma turned to Monkey Boy, heart in her throat, and he was still grinning.
“What in the world can you be smiling about?” She could barely speak. “Don’t you see all of this?”
Monkey Boy squeezed the limb with his legs to secure himself, while opening both arms toward the beach. “For us.”
Emma looked again. The dead outnumbered the population of the village of Vergers. They outnumbered all the people she had seen in her life.
Yet more machines and men were landing by the minute, trucks with balloons over their heads like miniature zeppelins, tanks, half-tracks, Jeeps, more ships approaching from the horizon, men with red flags directing traffic, an army pouring onto these sands hardly five kilometers from the village.
There was nothing for the invading hordes to gain. With the livestock gone, lands flooded, people cowed, there would be no spoils. Then why?
Emma suffered daily for friends and neighbors. They were doing it for strangers, throwing themselves on that beach, slaughtered till the sea ran dark, and another wave came, and was slaughtered, and another, whole cities of men. They had never met Emma, she would never meet them, and still another wave.
It was so humbling, Emma clung to the tree and did not think she could continue to breathe. The weight of their sacrifice might crush her. Here they had died, and up the beach they were still dying, in flocks and willingly for the idea that she, Emma herself, and her friends and family and neighbors, ought to live in freedom. Who on earth deserved such a gift?
She turned again to Monkey Boy, tears stinging the cut on her chin, and she nodded. “For us.”
Monkey Boy pulled the wagon with his chest puffed out. It was easy work compared with climbing. Also the woman who fed everyone rode in back, teaching him all sorts of shortcuts. If he knew trees, she knew forests, and it filled him with awe.
The fighting had moved inland from the beaches, he could tell. But whenever they approached troops of either army, or heard gunfire, or detected suspicious rustling in the leaves, she pointed with a stick and he towed in that new direction.
Soon they arrived at the barnyard of old Pierre. When they called out, no one answered. The river had flooded most of his land, his three cows corralled by water on a rise of grass near the barn. They seemed calm, however, their mouths chewing away at nothing.
Emma climbed down from the wagon, leaning on Monkey Boy’s arm, and they tiptoed into the barn. Pierre’s morning buckets sat untouched by the door. Dipping a stick in the milk, she saw that a skin had formed on the surface.
“Not good news,” Emma said.
Monkey Boy nearly laughed out loud. It was all unbearably exciting. The woman dug in her pocket for a small tobacco pipe, and with a groan from bending over, placed it on his milking stool. She spent a moment enjoying that image—in the dusty barn light it seemed like a painting, an artist’s still life—before shuffling out into the yard.
“There’s another stop nearby,” she said, and after a few minutes’ pulling they arrived at a fence of barbed wire, with a sign announcing that the area was mined. Emma climbed down again, sloshing through knee-deep water to the wire, and with a lift of her skirt she had stepped over the fence.
“But the sign,” Monkey Boy said, pointing.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I put it there.”
Emma waded around the hedgerow, but Monkey Boy could still see when her shoulders fell and her head dropped. She raised her arms and seemed to hug herself, swaying there, and he wondered if she was about to fall down again.
Emma turned and waded back to the wagon. “Drowned in their coop,” she said. “Every one of them.”
She gave no further explanation, leaving Monkey Boy to tow the wagon and ponder what it meant. He had not traveled twenty meters, however, when he thought he heard another cow.
“Wait,” Emma said, rising to her knees in the back.
The sound came again, and Monkey Boy knew it was not a cow. He pulled directly toward it, a place they had passed minutes before, but from the other direction so they had not noticed the man lying there, back in the dense hedgerow. He was tangled in ropes, his face smeared with pitch so that his eyes looked startlingly white, his body bent like a question mark.
He spoke in his language, tensely as if breathing hurt him, and pointed at his legs. Emma knelt beside the man, her face still swollen like an overinflated balloon, and instructed Monkey Boy: where to find scissors in the wagon, how to cut away the ropes, when to lift the branch that lay across the man’s ribs.
Monkey Boy studied the parachute tangled overhead. As the trees leaned in the wind, he considered climbing to pull the fabric free, which branches he would have to grab. The soldier continued speaking intensely, a ring of dried saliva around his mouth, until Emma pressed a finger to his lips to shush him. After that he only watched them with his strange white eyes.
Emma wrapped his legs in old sacks, using a bit of rope to pull them straight, which caused the soldier to growl and thrash his head from side to side.
When eventually he was breathing normally again, Emma held his legs while Monkey Boy took the rest of him, and they hoisted him out of the ferns. He made a yelp with each breath, and it reminded Monkey Boy of the sounds he heard a dog make once, when an occupying soldier had shot her in the leg.
But this paratrooper went silent, eyes closing as they settled him into the wagon. Monkey Boy held his palm over the soldier’s mouth before turning to Emma. “Still breathing.”