The Baker's Secret Read online

  Dedication

  To Ellen Levine and Jennifer Brehl

  in gratitude

  Epigraph

  It takes twenty years to bring man from his vegetable state inside the womb . . . to the stage where he begins to grow into maturity. It took thirty centuries to learn something about his structure. It would take an eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes only an instant to kill him.

  —Voltaire, 1764

  Men are not made for war. But neither are they made for slavery.

  —Jean Guéhenno, 1942

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: Bread Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Two: Want Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Three: Cunning Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part Four: Umbrellas Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Part Five: Hell on Earth Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Stephen P. Kiernan

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  Bread

  Chapter 1

  All through those years of war, the bread tasted of humiliation.

  For as long as their nation had possessed a history, the residents of Vergers village had been a people of pleasure, devoted to the senses without shame, and none savored more unapologetically than those of the kitchen. Over a span of centuries, their culture had turned the routine animal act of feeding themselves into an art form. Delectable breakfast morsels with steaming coffee as dark as mud, calming lunches in the shade when haste is the enemy and cheese is the dessert, dinners luxurious, candlelit, and lasting hours—such was the rhythm of their days: Who has a story to tell, and shall we place some flowers on the table?

  It did not matter that they lived in a tiny village a kilometer from the chilly northern ocean, their occupations either of the farm or of the sea. If anything, the labors of manure and milking, mending nets or hauling them, only intensified their love of flavor, patience, the company of friends. Therefore the baking of bread, a nearly daylong alternation between active kneading of dough and passive waiting for it to rise, could be as gratifying as deep breathing. In the hearth of the oven, where baguettes basked side by side, making loaves echoed making love.

  Then came the occupying army to teach their senses other lessons: the clack that boot heels make when snapped together at attention, the dull smell of a rifle after the barrel has been oiled. For some, this instruction included a comparatively milder discovery—that even the most pleasing kitchen task, when it is made compulsory, becomes tedious.

  Consider Emmanuelle: lovely, gifted in the kitchen, a fawn of twenty-two years. In any other time, the modest bakery where she was employed would serve as a center of commerce and community. In another era she would be distracted, preparing sweets for her Philippe, or taking all day to boil chicken stock down to a reduction so potent with concentrated flavor it could cast spells, all while dreaming of the drape of her someday bridal dress.

  Instead, she rose before dawn that day, the fifth of June, to the crowing of her rooster, a belligerent strutting shouter widely known and universally disliked, whose name was Pirate because of the dark patch around one eye. Having slept on the floor beside the couch on which her grandmother now snored, Emma folded her quilt, tucked it away, and tiptoed from the parlor without waking the aged woman or causing the occupying army’s captain to stir upstairs. Slipping into her shoes by the threshold, Emma strode with purpose across the barnyard. Pirate charged after her in full lecture—his hens, his morning, his territory—until she found a pinch of feed in her pocket and tossed it by the path, winning his silence long enough for her to reach the baking shed.

  Emma stirred somnolent coals in the brick oven her father had built, tossing in chestnut shells for kindling, giving the ashes a single long breath until they glowed awake and the shells crackled. Then began the tedium, the task the Kommandant had ordered her to perform seven days a week, as though she were a cow with milk to be wrung from her straining udder at morning and eve, or a chicken whelping one new egg per turn of the earth. With each passing day Emma’s love of baking grew a fraction drier, till what had once been her greatest joy dwindled to barely a husk.

  She lifted cheesecloth from several bowls on the side table and studied the dough risen there like white globes. Satisfied with what she saw, Emma punched the rounds, each one contracting with a clean yeasty sigh. Only then, and after a glance out the opening to reconfirm that Pirate was the sole creature stirring, she reached behind a hanging cloth into a bin, five times returning with a handful of golden powder that she sprinkled onto the dough.

  Straw. Ground fine each day to supplement the batter. Containing no nutrition whatsoever, its sole purpose was to add bulk. Thus were the rations of flour she received to make twelve loaves daily for the Kommandant and his men enlarged to produce fourteen, two of which she would secret away to divide among her neighbors and whoever in the village was in direst need.

  There was never enough. There would never be enough.

  Each morning required every crumb of Emma’s skills, all of her artifice, to bake loaves containing straw and have neither the Kommandant nor his officers notice. Yet this was only one of five hundred deceits, all conceived during the long strain of the occupation. She learned to sow a minefield and reap eggs. She could wander the hedgerows pulling a rickety cart, and the result would be maps. She could turn cheese into gasoline, a lightbulb into tobacco, fuel into fish. She could catch, butcher, and divide among the villagers a pig that later every person who had tasted it would insist had never existed. And all of these achievements would occur in a land of violence and slavery and oppression.

  In a time of humiliation, the only dignified answer is cunning.

  It began fittingly, with aroma. One morning three years earlier, when a stalled tank had blocked the paved road down the coast, the Kommandant instructed his driver to use the dirt lane that ran west from the village. Between low tide and the offshore wind, the air that day smelled sour and foul. But as the officer’s staff car passed Emmanuelle’s barnyard, the scent of baking loaves rose to him like a cloud of comfort. Ordering his driver to reverse, the Kommandant sat with closed eyes until the dust had settled. Then he stepped down from the passenger side, removing his leather gloves one finger at a time. He handed them to his driver and strolled forward.

  “What is that glorious smell? You, by that oven. Come forward.”

  Emma detested the occupying army’s language, which sounded to her as though it were created solely to give commands. Whenever soldiers conversed in her vicinity, she thought they were either gargling or preparing to spit. Sometimes she knew from their eyes that the words were lewd; lust sounds the same in every tongue. Hearing a man in uniform now speak her language, and fluidly, Emma was dumbfounded. For
get that she had scavenged flour for weeks to do that day’s baking, forget that her grandmother was hungry. She obeyed, marching across the barnyard with a loaf fresh from the oven.

  The Kommandant demanded a taste. She held the baguette toward him. He took it, immediately juggling the bread hand to hand, blowing on his fingers, then giving it to his aide to hold. As the junior officer used the gloves to protect his hands, Emma smiling inwardly at her enemies’ softness, the Kommandant composed himself. After a moment he tore one end from the loaf.

  “At home we call this ‘the pope’s nose,’” he said, waving the snout of the baguette in the air. It was huge, a pig’s portion. He bit hard with his perfect white teeth. Chewing so that his cheek muscles flexed, the Kommandant looked into the distance, as though trying to remember something.

  “Excellent,” he proclaimed after a moment. “You people certainly have a knack.” He turned to his aide, speaking in their harsh tongue for half a minute before facing Emma again. “I told him to establish a flour ration for mademoiselle, first quality. And to order that you proceed here unmolested by our men. They can be eager sometimes. Henceforth you will bake twelve baguettes daily for the officers’ mess.”

  The aide made a note on a paper, and off they drove, still holding the remainder of the loaf.

  How had Emma become so accomplished, able to bake with scant rations and yet produce a scent enticing enough to stop an army, having never ventured ten kilometers from the place where she was born?

  Ten years earlier, when Emmanuelle was as thin as a willow switch, Mémé had marched her past the barnyard wall, beyond the eastern well, up the lane to the village green, and into the shop of Uncle Ezra. A little bell rang as the door closed behind them. The place was warm and smelled of yeast.

  “I’ve brought you an apprentice,” Mémé declared.

  Ezra Kuchen had no relations nearby, did not socialize, never joined the rest of the villagers in Sunday Mass at St. Agnes by the Sea. Still, he made the most splendid sticky cinnamon rolls each year on Christmas Day, one for every child in Vergers. From wedding cakes to funeral pastries, no one else would do. Despite his gruff manner, therefore, over the decades he had become family to the townspeople, and thus Uncle.

  Now the mole-faced man glanced up from the counter where he was portioning dough into penny loaves, and in less than a second had focused again on his work. “No girls.”

  As if hired to prove the point, two young men labored away behind him. Emma observed one operating a giant mixer—the metal churning arm turned at a speed she would have slowed to avoid drying out the dough. The other portioned flour, cup by cup, into a large metal bowl—not noticing the slight spill he committed each time. Neither interrupted his work to see who had entered the store.

  Mémé dug in her sack, producing a pie tin. She set it on the shelf, slid away the cover, and broke off a piece of crust. “Taste.”

  Scowling, Uncle Ezra waddled out from behind the counter. Up close, his brow bore beads of perspiration. He took the crust, sniffed it, then popped it in his mouth. He chewed thoughtfully, then slowed. “You made this, Mémé? You’re improving.”

  For reply, she gestured with one hand. Emmanuelle, freckled and twelve, curtsied.

  “Is that so?” Uncle Ezra crossed his arms. “Then how did you cause it to flake so lightly? Answer me quick.”

  “Olive oil with the butter, sir. I melted them together first.”

  “Bah. How much?”

  “Two thimbles, sir.”

  “Heresy,” he muttered. But he reached for another taste.

  That was hundreds of baguettes ago, thousands. Seasons had passed, whole years. End to end, the loaves Emma had baked for her enemies would have stretched from her barn through the village to the beach, into the sea, across the salty sleeve of water, all the way to the island kingdom where the mighty Allies smoked cigars and made speeches about courage and did not come.

  Now, adding wood to the fire, Emma divided the dough for that fifth day of June into fourteen portions. She spread flour on the counter and began kneading the rounds into the long and slender baguette shape. Faintly she heard a whistling from outside, the high wandering melody that issued perpetually from the puckered lips of Monkey Boy. He would be stopping at the eastern well, just outside Emma’s barnyard wall, for his morning drink. Monkey Boy’s given name was Charles, but at birth he had been touched by God, was only half sensible, and preferred to spend his days in the trees.

  Emma wondered what would happen to Monkey Boy when he turned eighteen. His father was long gone; his mother despaired of so much as keeping the boy washed. Thus far, all he had demonstrated the capacity to do was sell apples, most of which the villagers purchased out of pity. The orchards in that region were solely cultivated for Calvados brandy, crushed in the fall and distilled in winter and far too bitter to eat, but somehow he had found a few trees whose fruit was edible. This discovery was no qualification for laboring far from home in the occupying army’s factories. Would the enemy conscript him to work there anyway, as they had Emma’s beloved Philippe? Or would they declare him useless, and dispose of him as they had so many others? Monkey Boy’s sixteenth birthday was in mid-August, not ten weeks away, and there was no chance the war would be over in two years. Not when it had already raged for four. Probably it would never end. So let him whistle and wander. It did no harm, and a short life might as well be a merry one.

  Emma eased the loaves into the oven, fourteen pale babies swaddled in a skin of water to make a crisp crust, using her thumbnail to mark the underside of each one in the shape of a V. May you break a tooth on it, she whispered.

  No one knew where the Vs began, or precisely what they meant. But for anyone with eyes open, they were as common as stones: carved into the public benches, scribbled on the chalkboards of summer’s empty classrooms, scuffed in the dirt outside the town offices. The occupying army saw, and announced that V meant victory, their mighty triumph. They put it on giant flags, flown high. By attempting to make V their own, however, they had no idea of the extent to which they committed an act of self-mockery. Proper Vs did not occur on flags or grand displays, but in secret and only among those who knew: matchbooks left on a café table, folded into a V. Driftwood piled upon the beach. Books standing open on their spines. Vs everywhere, little sprouting flowers of undiminished will.

  Nonetheless, Emma’s bread would taste of humiliation. Shame flavored the village’s food because it had infiltrated the people’s hearts.

  Twenty-six years after the Great War had devoured nearly two million of the nation’s young men, spending them on the countryside’s soils like so much fertilizer, a new aggressor had returned with even greater force. This mustached demon had a passion to his righteousness before which all people paled. His hordes swept through Belgium, requiring a mere nineteen days to march from armed border to triumph in the capital, whereupon the tanks turned their turrets in the direction of the coast, and the tiny village of Vergers.

  Who could blame the nation’s leaders for negotiating? The madman’s power was exceeded only by his fanaticism. The linden trees had not yet grown tall enough to shade the graves of those who had died in the last war. There were no lichens yet embroidering the monuments that bore their names. Who volunteers to sacrifice another generation of sons and husbands and brothers, especially for a fight that would be futile?

  Thus did life and liberty depend upon a distant ruler who did not speak the people’s language but felt at ease commanding them in his. The guttural ruled the elegant, the command replaced persuasion, the shout overwhelmed the subtle.

  The invader vowed that he would not repeat the Great War, that this time would be different. His troops would behave themselves, the radio was full of propaganda, and promises of the bright future fell like petals from a bough. They would win the people’s hearts, surely, once order had been established.

  It was a story people wanted to believe, but they knew better. Village by village the soldiers took
down the statues, carting old heroes and artists away in railcars, as if people were too ignorant to imagine that they would soon be melted into armaments, Napoleon into gun barrels, Balzac into bullets. The pedestals on which the bronzes had stood remained in place, however, though now they were monuments to nothing.

  Lies collapsed upon themselves like timbers of a barn on fire as the passionate lunatic systematically disregarded every word of the armistice. His troops took the people’s guns, confiscated their radios, packed men into cattle cars that were headed to his factories—so that his own nation’s males would be available to make new wars on new enemies.

  The occupying army spread across the continent with the persistence of a disease. Emma heard it was worse in Spain, where no one was permitted to travel anywhere, for any purpose. She heard it was worse in Belgium, where no one had enough to eat. She heard it was worse in Russia, where the charismatic maniac had besieged one beautiful city and incinerated many small ones.

  For two years the people of the coast lived behind a façade that fooled no one, their letters censored, mayors and police chiefs disappearing in the night, any loudmouth jailed or vanished, until the wild-eyed zealot declared it was enough. The nation would become one again, albeit united under identically strict rules. Almost overnight, the village’s signposts, alley walls, and storefronts all bore posters listing many forms of conduct—breaking curfew, possessing guns, aiding escaped prisoners, sheltering enemies, listening to foreign radio stations, refusing the occupying army’s currency—and under these lists stood a single word that required no translation: verboten.

  Eventually the truth revealed itself like the sun coming up. Fuel began to run short, battles elsewhere demanded more resources, and food rations fell by half. Fishermen, normally considered smelly and coarse, became a salvation, their catch the village’s only meat.