52 Loaves (34 page)

It was swaying.

I looked around but didn’t see a source of moving air. All the church doors were closed, and there were no electric fans in sight.

Yet, dear Mother of God, it was swaying! Almost imperceptibly, but back and forth ever so slightly, as if Christ were on a playground swing, not a cross. Or was it? Was I hallucinating? My eyes fixed on the cross, I tried to find a reference point behind it, a mark on the wall, so that I could determine whether the cross was swaying or I was, but the church was too dark. Disturbed, I needed something familiar to look at. I lowered my eyes to the choir and sought out Bruno, towering above the others. I could only make out his shadowy silhouette. His face hidden deep in the recesses of his hood, he was no longer my new best friend, his ear-to-ear grin lighting up the
fournil.
He was a stranger—unfamiliar, unfathomable, unapproachable. I shivered. I was back in the cold darkness of an earlier century.

It was time to go home.

Day 6:
Pain Surprise

I woke to unexpected good news. My airline seat had been miraculously upgraded to business class. It looked to be a relaxing, easy trip home today. Before packing, though, I wanted to have
breakfast and attend Lauds because, mindful of the selfish prayer I had uttered on my first day here, I had some unfinished business in church. A surprise treat awaited in the guest kitchen, where someone—presumably Bruno—had left half of the
pain au le-vain
miche
we’d made the previous day, turned on its cut end, just as I had instructed on my first day. I smiled. When I turned the bread over, I was stunned at the beautiful, open crumb and the distinctly alveolar structure. This was my bread? I had never baked a loaf that looked like this.

I cut a slice, the knife leaving a yeasty fresh-bread aroma in its wake, and took a bite. The bread bit back, announcing its presence, filling my mouth, my mind, my soul, with a medley of flavors and textures. The crumb was firm but yielding, with suggestions of rye and whole wheat, and just enough
levain.
I let the bread play on my tongue, which delighted in finding and poking through the generous holes, the vacuum of life left from the wild yeast’s frenetic anaerobic activity as, fueled by the intense heat of the abbey oven, it furiously metabolized, leaving little contrails of gas until, at about 125 degrees Fahrenheit, it exhaled its last breath.

I bit into the dark brown crust, crackly but not overly hard, remarkably and naturally sweet and complex, the product of those Maillard reactions I’d been seeking. I took another bite. And another. And one more, just to be sure. This was the best bread I’d ever tasted.

I had baked the perfect loaf.

The quest was over. Yet I felt cheated—there was no one to celebrate with. In fact, I was four thousand miles away from anyone who could even appreciate what this meant. Then I remembered where I was and realized that this was an occasion for contemplation and reflection, not hugs, noisy shouts, and champagne. I did at least get the pealing of bells, although they were
intended for Lauds, not me. I took a photograph of the bread and scurried to the church one last time.

Afterward I’d expected to meet only Bruno in the bakery, but a small farewell committee awaited me: Bruno and Philippe, of course, but also the prior, Jean-Charles, and the monk whose pocket knife had opened our first sack of flour what seemed like ages ago. I returned Bruno’s computer flash drive with all of the recipes on it, including one I’d written up the previous night for baguettes. Jean-Charles then made a short, gracious speech, thanking me, and presented me with a wrapped gift, “something for the eyes and something for the ears,” which turned out to be a gorgeous book of photographs of the abbey and a CD, recorded at Saint-Wandrille, of Gregorian chant.

In turn, I thanked Jean-Charles for this unforgettable experience, for allowing an American amateur baker to bake in their
fournil
and stay at this
abbaye magnifique.
Jean-Charles, embarrassed at my effusiveness (or perhaps my French—who knows what I really said), laughed. The festivities were cut short by some bad news:
la grève
had returned, with scattered strikes wreaking havoc with rail traffic into Paris, and trains running intermittently and off -schedule. They wanted to rush me to the station and an earlier train. I had ten minutes to pack.

Saying my good-byes quickly, I almost missed Bruno, my dear apprentice, shyly standing back. “Oh, Bruno!” I laughed, returning. He put out his hand. I shook it, then spontaneously embraced and kissed him, French-style, on each cheek. “Bon chance, mon ami,” I whispered in his ear.

I may have arrived by taxi, but I was leaving by chauff eur. Philippe drove me to the station in the abbey’s little car, winding past pastures and farms as I nervously glanced at my watch. Along the way, we reflected a bit on the week.

“Bread is important to the church as a symbol, no?” I said.

“Bread
is
the church,” Philippe said as we pulled into the train station nearly simultaneously with what would turn out to be the last train into Paris until evening, delivering me from the abbey in the same dramatic fashion in which I’d arrived.

With one last wave to Philippe, I ran aboard with my bags. As the train pulled out of the station, out of Normandy, out of the Middle Ages, I collapsed into a seat.

And wept.

Compline (from the Latin which means “to complete”) marks the completion of our day and leads back into the darkness of the night, but a darkness different from that of vigils.
This is the darkness of God’s mysterious presence.

If my first days in the Abbey had been a period of depression, the unwinding process, after I had left, was ten times worse.
—Patrick Leigh Fermor,
A Time to Keep Silence

Weight: 196 pounds
Bread bookshelf weight: 64 pounds

To say I experienced a rough reentry back to earth is putting it mildly. I returned with the grace of astronaut Gus Grissom, whose
Mercury
capsule sank in the Atlantic when he allegedly panicked and prematurely blew off the door of his spacecraft while bobbing in the waves. No one was hurt, but no one was happy, either.

I had read of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s difficulties in readjusting to outside life, but he had spent weeks at the abbey, and I a mere five days, so the moodiness and depression that followed caught me off -guard.

Arriving home on a Tuesday night, I went to work on Wednesday. That was a mistake. I called in sick Thursday and Friday, giving myself a four-day weekend. I needed time to think, to find my center of gravity, to understand what had happened in those five extraordinary days.

I hardly talked. I slept a great deal and, when in the kitchen, listened to the CD of Gregorian chant the abbey had recorded. I thought I recognized some voices. I could tell Anne was worried.
Finally I felt I had to broach the subject. I cleared my throat as we sat alone at the kitchen table. “I’m having some readjustment problems,” I finally said.

She laughed nervously. “No kidding.”

That was the end of the conversation. I had nothing to add.

The next day, Anne leafed through the book of photographs of Saint-Wandrille that I’d been given, looking for clues, and asked, “If you’re ready to talk about it—what is it about the abbey that you miss? It looks like such a peaceful place in the photographs.”

“I’m not ready to talk about it.”

We sat in silence. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk about it. I just didn’t know what to say. I considered trying to describe an image I’d had while sitting on a wall my last afternoon at Saint-Wandrille, an image I’d not been able to shake, but one so odd I hesitate to mention it even now.

It was of a dessert plate, of all things, covered with white chocolate sauce, over which lay a perfect circle of dark chocolate drawn from a chef’s squeeze bottle. If you watch cooking shows, you already know what happened next: a disembodied hand bearing a knife descended and, with a quick stroke, pulled the circle outward at one point, disrupting the perfect arc, before withdrawing. Silently recalling that image, I held back tears. Finally I got up and left. I wanted to be alone.

Over the next few days, I became aware that the sharpening of senses I’d experienced while at Saint-Wandrille had remained. For the first time, I heard the drone of the overhead ventilation as I received physical therapy on my back (which had been pain free at the abbey but was now aching again). I noticed how a radio host signed off, not with the usual “Have a good day,” but with “Make it a good day,” which I must’ve heard a thousand times before, yet had never before
heard.
I found it very appealing. The
voice of a yardman, a Haitian immigrant, in the lumberyard who acknowledged a two-dollar tip with “God bless you,” instead of “Thank you,” reverberated with me for days.

My mind wandered down previously unvisited corridors. Still in my first week back, while waiting with Anne in the eye doctor’s Office, I saw a poster with a diagram of the human eye. “Did you ever wonder,” I asked when she returned from being dilated, “what kind of species might have evolved if there were no eyes? Vision is just an illusion, the result of light bouncing off an object and our eyes and brains making sense of it. But strictly speaking, it’s not necessary for intelligent life.”

“Well, there’s slugs,” she said, to satisfy me.

“Yes, and deep-sea fish and lower forms of life, like microscopic organisms, but that’s because any animals that evolved with sight crowded out those without. But if no one had the advantage of sight, would there still have been higher forms of life that create music and poetry? And what form would that life have taken?”

Anne opened up the newspaper, no doubt wondering how long this business was going to last and when the old me was going to return. Problem was, I was becoming kind of comfortable with the new me.

“Vision,” I repeated, “is an illusion.”

The first crack in the thin crust that separated me from my old life came as I lay in bed early one morning, half-asleep, listening to the radio, undecided if I was going to the Office or not. I’d dreamed about the abbey again, as I would every single night for the first six days I was home. (The dreams stopped, weirdly but appropriately enough, on the seventh night.) The topic of this morning’s radio stargazing feature was a noteworthy but regular phenomenon in the heavens. Venus, the host explained, was rising in the east four hours before the sun, a particularly advantageous circumstance that made it glow particularly bright.

My eyes flew open, suddenly wide and alert. Of course, I’d known that my morning star—that brilliant star I had seen from the abbey—had an astronomical explanation, but I’d been clinging to the slim hope that it had been something, however improbably, cooked up for me. The fact that it was a regularly occurring phenomenon diminished its impact, making me wonder if the entire week had been, not a spiritual experience, but an illusion that my subconscious, sensing the need for a good show, had created.

The next crack in the crust shattered it to crumbs, when I received an e-mail from Brother Philippe, thanking me and inquiring about my trip home.

“The Father Abbot will ask the community on Monday evening if we want to continue making our own bread or not,” he added. What? I thought it was a done deal, that the bread was a smash, Prior Jean-Charles was onboard, and if Bruno could throw together a decent baguette once in a while, the abbot would be happy. This sudden uncertainty made me jittery and shocked me back to my old self.

“Can you believe this?” I fumed to Anne. “They’re putting it up to a vote? I travel eight thousand miles for them, and these overgrown choirboys are going to have a meeting and take a vote? Isn’t anyone in charge there?”

I immediately regretted “overgrown choirboys,” especially since Philippe, one of those choirboys, had added, “I will pray for you.” I had wanted to hold on to that abbey feeling and was finding out just how difficult that was going to be. Less than a week after I’d left, it seemed that what happened in the abbey did in fact stay in the abbey. Saddened and ashamed by my outburst, I resolved at least to try to adopt the temperament of the monks, to ask myself before gritting my teeth over traffic or swearing over a burnt loaf of bread, “How would Bruno react?”

The next day, a handful of teenage French exchange students, including one who coincidentally was staying with us for two weeks, ended up at our house with their American hosts. I’d noticed that our student wasn’t too crazy about American food, although she was too polite to say anything. I figured the others might also be missing French food—not to mention home—so I did something totally uncharacteristic for me, something I couldn’t have imagined myself doing a month ago: I invited the whole crew to stay for dinner.

After digging up the remaining leeks in the garden for leek-potato soup, I made six baguettes and an apple tart with apples picked from our orchard. The aroma of baking bread, the flour in my hair, the dough under my fingernails, the challenge of baking without my scale, which I’d left with Bruno, brought me back to this life.

The girls, seven in all, eagerly wolfed down the soup, so busy eating that they hardly spoke. The bread on the table disappeared. Anne sliced some more, which also disappeared. One of the French girls, her eyes wide, looked up at Anne. “You are a good bak-eer,” she said in a lovely accent.

Anne pointed to me.

“You?” She was stunned.

I smiled.

She ate another slice. “You are a
very
good bak-eer. This eez very good bread.”

I bowed slightly. “Merci beaucoup, mademoiselle.”

I saved the remaining two loaves for our student’s breakfast each morning. She greatly preferred it to the English muffins we’d been feeding her.

Anne later said, “That was really nice of you to do that. I could tell the girls really appreciated it.”

In reality, though, it was an act as selfish as it was thoughtful. For a few minutes, I’d recaptured the spirit of the abbey, where “guests are received as Christ,” and, most importantly, found a way to get my crumbling psyche through the weekend.