The French Baker's War, page 23
“What—” André has difficulty getting it out. “What did they do to her?”
“The soldier ran back to the officer. They started talking to each other in the street right outside.”
“I asked about Mireille.” André glares at her. He straightens again and folds his arms, unwilling to budge until she tells him, like he needs to suffer.
She understands him wanting answers, but it’s the details mulled over endlessly that damage you, the tiniest ones sticking in thoughts like a chicken bone in a throat.
“The soldiers ran over to her. She tried to get away; she managed to push open the door; the bell rang. She must’ve seen Frédéric—I dared to look and saw her expression, so helpless and confused.
“But they were on her before she could step in. I lay down so they wouldn’t see me, but I could make out the sounds of them dragging her off. She screamed she wasn’t doing anything, begged them to let her go. When I looked again, they were in the street trying to put the manacle on her. She was flailing and kicking out. She bit one soldier’s hand and he cried out in pain, and I thought: Good for her.” Émilie casts her eyes down. “It was selfish, I know.”
Still clutching Mireille’s note, André starts walking. Émilie shuts her eyes, appealing to be given the iron determination for what’s coming next.
She heaves herself up and follows him back towards the station. How can he sleep now? She hadn’t wanted to say anything, fearing knowing what occurred would get him killed, but maybe now it will save him. She remembers something her father—her heart leaps—was fond of repeating: “Quand le vin est tiré, il faut le boire.” Yes, the wine has been opened, she opened it, so it’s up to her to drink it.
Émilie stands beside André on the platform. A train pulls in, and disembarking passengers push past them, buffeting them like tree branches in a gale. She hardly notices, André even less.
She waits for him to speak. When the passengers are gone and he still hasn’t said anything, she moves in front of him and looks him in the eyes. André meets her gaze unflinchingly, defying her to finish her god-awful account of what became of his wife.
Her insides ache with nauseating intensity, and she has to bite her lip against the pain before carrying on.
“The officer’s patience must’ve worn thin. He glanced up at the sky and took in a deep breath. Then he exhaled, and in this horrible continuous motion, he turned and hit her on the side of the head with his rifle.”
André flinches but doesn’t look away. He’s turned to stone, and she’s Medusa, her lies the serpents, her curse on him irreversible.
Émilie tells him, slightly above a murmur, that Mireille dropped to the ground and the Germans picked her up and put her in the cart. She can’t tell him they threw the poor woman in.
“The officer tore off her apron and flung it aside, and he walked to the front of the line with the burly soldier. The one wearing glasses ripped something off her neck and pocketed it. One of them used a whip on the horse—it was like another gunshot. I hid again. I heard them continue down the street.”
“Her cross,” André says distantly. Émilie is unsure what he means, then understands: the German stole Mireille’s cross.
“She saved me.” Émilie’s voice is almost a squeak.
André stares at the factory. It must be torture for him to realize his wife’s right there. His muscles go taut like he’s considering storming up there and freeing her. A cog in his own fate, as predictable as rain.
“Why would they take her? That doesn’t make sense. She isn’t a Jew.” His tone is hollow with disbelief.
“I’ve been asking myself that over and over. Émilie says simply, “I escaped. “Mistakes are severely punished. They couldn’t show up with one of us missing. Without me.” She hears the remorse in every word reverberate inside. “They took her to make up the numbers.”
André turns back and pierces her with a look of abject hate.
•
Just before curfew, Monsieur Durand sits with André and Frédéric, watching Émilie sew a coat for the boy. She finished repeating what she told André that afternoon, and Monsieur Durand needs time to sculpt some sense out of it. He heard a few of the particulars before—Madame Bujold imparted to him what she witnessed that day from behind her shutters, as fragmented as could be expected for something seen through slats. But it’s the specifics and the corroboration Émilie provides that makes hearing what happened more numbing.
Lately, he’s listened to an increasing number of anecdotes chronicling the vagaries of war and its atrocities, either from customers in whispers, or in letters from his few former colleagues still at the Sorbonne, unsigned less their frank opinions be intercepted and the writers unmasked. But hearing it about Mireille, someone Monsieur Durand has known since she was a child, makes it that much more potent. Such accounts cause his aching bones to feel weak and brittle. War makes everyone old, except for those it kills.
When he brought Frédéric back from the librairie, André was scouring baking tins in the preparation area, and Émilie was moving around upstairs, the floorboards creaking above them. André trailed him and the boy up the stairs, but wouldn’t eat. Émilie said very little until Monsieur Durand asked her what was wrong. That’s when she told her story over, seemingly as resolute now to divulge her secret as she was before not to tell a soul.
André sat listening to it again, his eyes closed when he wasn’t drumming his fingers on the table, grunting under his breath.
“Could you return to him?” Monsieur Durand asks. “This man at the blue door, might he still help?”
Émilie stops sewing. “I don’t think he can, even if he wanted to, even if we paid him everything we could put our hands on. Smuggling out a note was probably all he could ever do.”
“Yet, you didn’t stop dealing with him.” It comes out more accusatory than he means it.
Émilie lets out a long sigh. “I suppose I wanted to believe he could do something.”
André stands, scraping his chair on the floor. “Time for bed, Frédéric.”
The boy scampers over to a book and holds it up for Émilie to see.
“Of course,” she says. “Just let me—”
“Bed. Now,” André barks, making Frédéric whimper. “Stop that. You’re not a baby anymore.”
Monsieur Durand vigourously rubs an eyebrow. What an uncharacteristic manner for him to take with the child. “André, are you not being—”
“And how is it any of your business?” The baker’s face contorts. “I’ve had enough of people meddling in my life. Enough of words, always words and more words—they mean nothing and change even less.”
“You can’t be clever and angry at the same time. Mireille would want you to—”
“And how would you know?”
Émilie extends a hand to Frédéric, who’s lost amongst the adults’ harsh tones. “Go to bed, petit lutin. I’ll be over to tuck you—”
“I’ll do it.” André barges over to Frédéric’s bed and pulls down the covers. Frédéric lifts his big eyes to Émilie, helpless to comprehend his father’s anger. With a single tap of his foot in defiance, the boy pads over to his bed and tumbles into the sheets.
André pulls the cover up and joins them again at the table, but doesn’t sit. He hovers over them, tottering in the winds of his own rage. He turns on Monsieur Durand, his voice dripping with accusation. “You knew Mireille was involved with the Resistance and you said nothing.”
“I...suspected,” Monsieur Durand says. “If I kept anything— I didn’t mean to, mon ami. I was put in a very difficult—”
“And her?” André jerks his head towards Émilie. “She knows where Mireille is. She knew all along.”
“No, that’s not—” Émilie starts to protest.
André ignores her and spits out at Monsieur Durand, “Did you?”
The lines on Monsieur Durand’s face deepen as he searches for a reply. So many confidences—why did he forget that to keep one means all of them will be broken? He strived to be a true friend. His heart rips open at his abysmal failure at doing so.
The baker explodes. “Get out!” He pulls Monsieur Durand from the chair by his collar. “Get out, you maudite tapette.”
“André!” Émilie cries out.
He drags Monsieur Durand to the stairs and roughly pushes him, almost toppling him down them. “Don’t come back.”
Holding onto the wall with one hand, Monsieur Durand reaches out the other one, beseeching André to reconsider. He’s at a loss how to best express his regret. A lifetime of reading and writing, and still he’s reduced to saying, “Please, André. I never meant for this to happen.”
André says nothing. When Monsieur Durand realizes there’s only disgust left in his friend, he slowly descends the steps.
He could never hurt them. André has to know he wouldn’t dream of harming as faithful a family as them. Being called that reprehensible insult leaves him devastated, no different from if he’d been pummelled by fists. He’s had a lifetime of names. Cuts and bruises heal, vindictive words fester.
Monsieur Durand hesitates at the front door to look back at the shop. The wonderful times he’s had here when Georges and Marie-Claire took over the pâtisserie: dinners, when they bought the display case, when Mireille was born. There were dreadful times, too: a fire that almost destroyed their shop, and when the Pellegrins died, so close together, like they never stopped holding hands. That’s what he told Mireille and André to console them over the loss of her parents. He prided himself on having an aptitude for comforting others with his words. How arrogant!
These magnificent bakers welcomed him into their family in place of his blood relatives who no longer spoke to him because of whom he loved, as if that was something he could stop like the twist of a faucet. They befriended him at a juncture in his life when carrying on was unbearable.
Fear overtakes him. Is he to end up falling into his grave without mourners? If so, he doesn’t know how to change it. He feels panicked, stranded in a desert with no idea which direction to walk, unable to see his footsteps in the sand behind him.
It’s nothing to die; it’s everything not to have lived.
Monsieur Durand slips out into the dim street and slogs home, feeling more lonely and abandoned than ever, a comfortless shadow fading into the night.
THIRTY
Wednesday, November 24, 1943
The smell of burnt sugar lingers. Unable to sleep, Émilie crept downstairs to start the baking, and left the first batch in too long. Now those biscuits sit stoically on the worktable, their edges black.
The trouble she caused for Monsieur Durand kept her up all night wearing away the colour from her worries. She shouldn’t have let André throw him out. She couldn’t stop thinking about how he assaulted the old man. And that appalling name! She’d heard homosexuals in the camps called that by guards, and even other prisoners. André’s in pain, and when someone can’t endure their pain any longer, they wield it like a scythe, cutting down everything.
She didn’t have the nerve to rouse him from his bed to talk about what took place. She rationalized what André did by telling herself he had to have been upended listening to her story, set adrift hearing what happened to his wife. It would have been better had his idea of what happened to Mireille remained undisturbed, even if it meant he’d stay trapped in a cage built with the bones of memories.
There are footsteps on the stairs. André comes in, his eyes roaming like those of a wild animal. They stop for a moment on the biscuits she baked, before moving on.
“If you knew what we made do with during Passover.” Émilie gives him a tentative smile.
The ouvert sign, turned to the street, catches his attention. He marches over and flips it around, then locks the door.
“Who said you could open? I should throw you out. With any luck, you’ll land at the feet of the Germans.” He expels the words like they’ve been marinating in the Devil’s mouth. She resumes baking as if not having heard them.
There’s a long silence, the air thick with challenge and hair-trigger fury, before André thumps back upstairs.
Émilie holds out a hand—it’s shaking. She’s glad she didn’t rise to the bait; still she’s riddled with shame. How easily it is to become hurt children.
The words André slung at her last night ring in her head. She shouldn’t have expected this sheigetz to be any different. She’s only known one who wasn’t, her husband Claude, rare as Byzantine silk in so many ways.
•
Soon as André returns upstairs, he knows he has to go back to Argenteuil-sur-Lac. Pulling on his coat and cap, he races down to the shop and out the front door without glancing at Émilie. Why did he let her step back in there after what she told him?
The train ride allows him to think without being bothered, and when he arrives at his destination, he strides with purpose to the checkpoint.
André narrows his eyes at the factory up the road. The sentries give him threatening looks, but they don’t confront him. Feeling his face pinch with anger and deliberation, they wouldn’t be blamed for assuming there’s something wrong with him, that he’s not right in the head. Just in case, they watch him like mangy dogs ready to pounce on a scrap of meat.
He focuses on the perimeter guards patrolling behind the factory. Breaking in would be suicidal, and still Mireille might not be free. There has to be a way to get to her.
When a sentry starts towards him, André tips his cap and walks away.
He ends up at the café sitting next to the window. He orders a watered-down apple juice, the only thing they have to drink today, and nurses it until dusk. Then he pays and starts shuffling back to the railway station. All this time, and he’s still a jumble of emotions and unanswerable questions. What a waste. Another day amounting to nothing. He should be home.
This thought depresses him. The pâtisserie no longer holds any pleasure. It’s like all the good memories of that place don’t belong to him anymore—they’ve been exorcised as thoroughly as midnight demons. Now the shop exists to mock him.
At least Frédéric will be happy to see him, but the woman will still be there. What else is she keeping from him? His blood congeals at the thought. She’s a viper. And after all André did for her. He’ll never forgive her for not telling him sooner about the note. How much longer will Mireille have to be there because of that curséd woman?
Again, André’s as furious as when Émilie first told him about Mireille—he feels snapped at by the teeth of wolves. But he won’t be weakened by anything again. At the vignoble, after they cut back the vines in autumn, they always came back stronger in the spring.
He glances back at the factory. Mireille being with another man would be more merciful than being held up there having to endure God knows what.
André passes the station and plods up the street. Abruptly, he turns into the forest and starts running. Dead leaves and twigs give out brittle warnings as his feet grind them into the ground. In the branches above, birds start squawking. The dankness of their droppings and the stench of decay take turns assaulting André’s senses.
He keeps going until he makes out light from the factory’s windows through the trees.
André crouches and scans the field between him and the back of the building. No guards. He darts to the factory’s wall. There’s a rapid-fire knocking in his chest, but he pushes himself to carry on. He can’t waste a second. Mireille’s just there, so near he feels her.
The windows are too high, and André struggles to drag over a rain barrel squatting at the far end of the wall. Thankfully, it’s half-filled, a drop more and it couldn’t be moved. Climbing up on it, he balances on the rim and peers through a window. Prisoners, mostly women, are working or shuffling to a side door. They look alike: the same dirty grey uniforms, same kerchiefs around their heads, the same exhausted and crushed expressions.
He hunts for Mireille, but doesn’t find her. He scrutinizes each face with the meticulousness of making a dozen identical entremets.
A truck rumbles up the road, and headlights illuminate the field. André jumps off the barrel and crouches beside it. The vehicle stops next to the factory, its lights resting on André’s hiding place.
The factory door opens. Prisoners file out, escorted by two soldiers, and climb in the truck without being told, submissive as whipped dogs.
André takes a cautious look and spots a woman bent over as though groaning under a load that would bring a beast of burden to its knees. She straightens to pull off her kerchief—her face is filthy and her hair’s closely cropped. Mireille! Joy floods André’s heart. But it’s short-lived. Surrounded by Nazis, she could be as far away as the rice fields of Indochine for all the good it will do.
Mireille stops to argue with one of the Germans. The soldier forcefully shoves her, almost knocking her over. Still she persists. Her back straightens and more words are exchanged—André can’t make them out over the noise of the truck’s engine idling. Mireille licks the corner of her lips the way she does when her patience is being tried, and André’s pulse skips. Only when the soldier raises a fist, threatening to hit her, does she climb in with the other prisoners.
André pulls out Egger’s Luger. He’ll be damned if he lets any-one touch her. When he takes a step towards them, lights sweep the field from behind him. Two perimeter guards, each carrying an MP40 and a flashlight, walk his way.
André ducks and crams himself best as he can into the crook between the barrel and the wall.
The last prisoner is climbing in the truck when the perimeter guards reach it. They exchange pleasantries with the soldiers, the four of them indistinguishable in the beams of the constantly moving flashlights. André has glimpses of round faces and thin bodies. One guard waves his arms, imitating swimming, then shakes them as if being eaten. The others laugh at his exaggerated gestures. The guard leans in conspiratorially, possibly to tell a dirty joke or brag about one of his sexual exploits. His pals ripple with anticipation for the punchline like children waiting to open gifts.
