Captain Schwartz stood over Thalheim, muttering, “We weren’t gone ten minutes. What the hell happened?”
“She saved me,” Emma said, pointing at her grandmother.
The officer directed two men to remove the body. They dragged it away up the road out of sight.
The invading soldiers were weighted down with gear—canteens, bandoliers, grenades—yet they didn’t seem burdened by it. They looked fit and well fed, chatting easily while Mémé ate more of their rations. Emma sat at the kitchen table, penciling hedgerow shortcuts and occupying army posts onto the captain’s maps. With her writing hand in a splint, the best she could do was make Xs, and explain what each one meant.
“Here you follow the animal trails, you’ll see them in the tall grass, until it opens onto a dirt road.”
Captain Schwartz nodded. “How do we take that church? The steeple is visible from a distance, so it’s a key rendezvous point.”
“There is a machine gun.” She tapped the page with her pencil. “It faces the village, so you can surprise them from behind.” She handed him the paper. “If your men are quiet, that is. A map won’t do the fighting for you.”
“This is all incredibly helpful.” The captain sat back, though he continued scratching his chin.
“But?”
He shrugged. “Ammunition. Nothing to be done, but we could sure use more of it.”
Emma stood, despite her injuries feeling stronger by the minute. “Follow me.”
When the captain saw the stacks in the old hog shed, he danced a little jig. Then he called his men; they opened some boxes and took turns equipping themselves.
Emma stood by, surprised to feel herself moved at the sight. “I am glad this supply will not go to waste.”
“It’s a gold mine,” Schwartz answered. “Bringing this here must have been incredibly dangerous for you.”
“Not me,” Emma began, her throat tightening as she recalled her disdain for the Goat, years of it, while he had sweated and carried and taken risk after risk. “A friend.”
Suddenly four soldiers dropped to one knee, rifles to their cheeks. Emma glanced around, not seeing anything as the captain pushed her into the shed. The stink of pig made her eyes water.
Then they all heard the sound of crickets, and the soldiers relaxed. Captain Schwartz shouted, and a group of new men came forward, with someone huddled behind them.
“I don’t understand,” Emma said.
The captain held up a wooden trinket, thumbing it rapidly to create an almost cricket sound. As the troops greeted one another, Schwartz interrupted to question the new arrivals. Then he turned to Emma. “I’m afraid I have to leave you with an additional responsibility. These men found one of your villagers near the conflict. Can you please take care of him?”
Emma tried to peer past the officer. “Who is it?”
The soldiers parted, a form stumbled forward. It was Argent, the young professor from the mansion on the bluff. His glasses were gone, his face lacerated on one side. Emma looked beyond, but there was no one else with him.
Though she had never learned his wife’s name, Emma felt the loss like a blow. And the baby, barely a day old. Before she could offer comfort, though, or say anything, the infant mewed in her father’s arms. He was carrying the newborn after all.
“Ha!” Emma cried, clapping her hands once. The soldiers turned to peer at her, and she seemed equally surprised. What was this rush of emotion? Was it actually a glimmer of optimism? In spite of everything, the child was alive.
“Baby,” Mémé said. She scurried to the house’s doorway, waving an arm to invite them inside. “Baby.”
The young professor turned in the direction of that voice, stumbling into the house, and in his weary arms a bundle of warm cloth: the pink-skinned girl whose nappie needed changing, who needed to nurse but would never nurse again, whose exhaustion had overwhelmed all of her other wants so that she slept even though war raged around her, eyes closed as if instead of chaos and violence the world were a quiet nursery.
Although months of conflict remain, at a cost of thousands of lives, this very second is the moment that the war begins to end, the time that the future commences.
The baby girl, Gabrielle, will not grow up with memories of occupation and invasion. Her childhood and adolescence will contain a treasury of hours—with Emma at bedtime, in Odette’s café, playing in the hayloft while Pierre milks his girls—of hearing the story: who survived and how, who outsmarted whom, which people sacrificed and how much.
Their stories were like a cemetery in the mind, naming the dead, mourning what was lost. But they also made a chapel in the imagination, proof that the people were strong enough to endure. Catalog of triumph, relic of redemption; story was souvenir, salve, and salvation.
Gabrielle divined this insight only after the war had ended, however, after the villagers had experienced the merciful tincture of time. On that gusty June night—blood on their clothes, hunger in their bellies, aching in their hearts—the people’s future remained a frightening unknown. Gunfire clattered in the distance, a thudding of mortars. Soldiers prepared for battle in the dark. The smell of gunpowder arrived on the wind.
Who should swagger into the barnyard just then, but Pirate. Feathers scorched and disheveled, he strutted before the soldiers undaunted, crowing at them in full volume: get out of his barnyard, get away from his roost. The men laughed.
One soldier said something in his language to the captain, who made a firm reply, and the laughter stopped.
“What did he ask?” Emma said.
“If he should shoot him,” Schwartz answered. “I said that scrappy little guy is actually part of what we’re here to save.”
Then he cleared his throat and called orders. The men assembled, checking their equipment one last time. Captain Schwartz turned to Emma. “Here. Something to remember us by.” He handed her a hard square of foil.
“As if I’m likely to forget,” she answered.
“Okay, men,” the captain shouted. “Let’s march.” He strode through the barnyard door, soldiers filing behind him, their bodies hunched and rifles raised.
After the last of them had passed beyond the eastern well, into the hedgerow and out of sight, Emma found herself standing alone. Hell on earth continued all around: flames on the horizon, bombers snarling overhead, people inside the house awaiting her help. But for that brief interval the barnyard was an oasis, a private moment of calm. It felt vaguely familiar, as if from a long, long time ago.
Here was the place Philippe would return to, and bit by bit recover with the help of a woman as steady as rock, and find himself healed by the joyous, exhausting duties of fathering. Here was the place that the future lived.
With her good hand Emma unwrapped the foil around the captain’s gift. Chocolate, a fat square of it, and she immediately bit off a chunk. After all those years of eating sparely, she felt her mouth flooded with flavor: rich, milky, sweet.
The taste of hope.
Acknowledgments