By Richard Salsbury

I always make sure I am standing behind the counter when the captain comes for his bread— my hair tied into a bun, hands clasped behind my back as if I have nothing else to do. I like to make a good impression for him and, it is true, his twice-weekly order is the largest we supply to anyone in the town. The garrison must be fed.

He treats me as a professional rather than a woman, and for this I am grateful; I have heard rumors about his appetites. I still remember the time he asked why I had no husband, and I feared it was a prelude. Since then I have made myself as plain as white bread in his presence. I have always wondered—but never asked—why he does not send a subordinate to collect the loaves.

“The last batch is just coming out of the oven,” I assure him. “I saw to them myself.”

He does not reply. It is his habit to stand in an uncompromising military posture as if thrusting forward the medals on his left breast for inspection, but today some yoke weighs him down. He pulls at his mustache.

“All is well, I hope, Captain.”

He expects this kind of politeness from me, though by doing so I am inviting him to stoke the fires of his frustration. I have never been the subject of one of his famous rages, and I hope I never will. Our conversations have always been civil and, in the manner of a hairdresser, I am trusted with little confidences. I have built a picture from them. I know that the captain resents his posting here, at the last major town at the edge of the Empire, where the tree line stops and the tundra begins. I know he is under pressure from the district commandant to root out the seditious.

“We are down six horses,” he erupts. “Six! And still, they stall. How long can it take to send replacements from the capital, even to a backwater like this?”

A backwater like this. My home for thirty-five years. Skating on the frozen lakes as a child. Stringing hammocks between the northernmost evergreens to watch the migration of caribou beneath us. The exhaustion—right and good and proper—after burying an old friend in the frozen earth, our sweat, our tribute.

I say nothing, knowing the captain has not finished.

“Worse,” he says, “a number of the men are sick.”

Normally I would remain facing him, my eyes fixed directly on his, or at the floor just in front of his boots—whichever seems appropriate. I knew the time would come when I would find this impossible, when I would have to turn away.

To one side of me, taped to the tiled wall, is a poster of Our Beloved Leader—all red and black, angles and thrust. There is a crease in one corner. I know because I placed it there a few days ago, specifically for a circumstance such as this. I pretend to notice it and turn to lovingly flatten it out, precious seconds where I need not meet the captain’s gaze.

He once told me that a man’s actions tell you more about him than the words he uses. The tongue is a slippery thing, the sounds it forms distrustful. And yet when I turn back to him, when propriety demands it, nothing has changed. I must speak. His silence is its own command.

“I had heard the rumors,” I say. “I wish them a swift recovery.”

Like a bureaucrat, he deals in numbers—seventy-eight loaves, seventy-eight men in the garrison, six horses down, three reports to write before evening. It is when he cannot enumerate things that he becomes agitated. How many of our enemy’s troops massing in the settlements to the west? How many revolutionaries hidden in the town? How many of his men too ill to fight, should the need arise?

“I do hope their hunger is not affected, Captain. A man must eat to keep up his strength.”

“No. On the contrary, they seem hungrier than ever.”

Again, I struggle to find words. It is uncommon for there to be two such silences in one of our conversations. I used up my diversion with the poster too soon.

The clock ticks, slower and slower, the seconds stretching like dough.

I am saved by the banging of the interior door. My assistant wheels out the loaves—a stack of wooden trays atop a hand truck, covered with a cloth. As always, the captain lifts the cloth and I see his lips move—“three times four equals twelve per crate, times six equals seventy-two, plus six on top is seventy-eight.” He finds comfort in this counting, never once asking me about the baking, or indeed the ingredients. The correct number of loaves have been baked, and therefore all must be in order.

He inclines his head in farewell, then turns and leaves, issuing over his shoulder a curt, “Come,” to my assistant. My lungs are free to fill again.

He understands numbers, but he does not understand people. People are like loaves—under the right conditions they will rise. All they need is a little yeast.