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 fa?ade 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.
The fastest-growing crop of that season was indignation. When a man has raised a calf, fed it, and milked it, and he sees the full frothing bucket taken away for someone else’s breakfast, the woes of elsewhere dwindle and his stomach is not all that grumbles. Only nursing mothers, pregnant women, and young children were permitted to receive a ration of milk. The occupying army insisted that this was an act of generosity. Thus did the people learn that thirsting occurs on many levels.
Some said that the coastal villages had it easier, with mere occupation. Should the Allied liberators ever rouse themselves and come to their aid, however, these lands would be the likely place of collision. No man offers his wheat field to serve as a battlefield. No woman wants her home to be a bunker.
Many days Emma saw the Allies’ bombers far overhead, aimed at some destination hundreds of miles inland, her village’s predicament so far below it might as well have been the circumstance of ants. From time to time they would cast their wreckage down, tumbling tin caskets that caused destruction so casual she wondered if these pilots might not be enemies after all: the main road to Caen destroyed, four bridges punctured which previously had enabled farmers to come to market, one of the nicest vacation homes on the bluff above the beach blown into a million bits.
The veterinarian Guillaume, a broad-shouldered man with great bushy eyebrows, explained everything to a group in the village one afternoon. Famously a devoted bachelor, Guillaume had later in life found himself a small-boned wife, a considerably younger woman, in Bayeux. Initially people thought Marie was a snob, but gradually they learned it was only that she was as shy as a newborn deer. They had just the one daughter, Fleur, barely a teen but already a staggering beauty. Timid like her mother, she wore a blue apron with patch pockets, in which her hands continuously fiddled with whatever lay hidden there.
Days after hanging the verboten posters, the occupying army was away performing maneuvers on the beach, their trucks and tanks and the thud of mortars firing, which enabled Guillaume to speak freely. Still the people formed a tight scrum in front of the row of shops, shoulder to shoulder.
The one exception was the Goat, who listened from the periphery. A ragged young man with a half-grown beard whose actual name was Didier, the Goat sometimes slept on a shelf in Emma’s empty hog shed, emerging in the morning steeped in the smell of pig urine, a scent as pungent as ammonia. Also, he would argue over the least thing. Once she had heard him dispute with Yves, an experienced fisherman, over the direction of the wind. Whether it was due to his fragrance, therefore, or his antagonistic nature, the villagers’ otherwise close circle gave the Goat ample room. Emma, too, kept her distance from the group—and from the Goat, because of an event in their school days about which she was still angry. She lingered in the doorway of Uncle Ezra’s bakery, a mixing bowl in the crook of her arm, a wooden spoon in her free hand. Eyeing something across the square, she stirred and listened.