The Boy at the Top of the Mountain (2 page)

‘Who’s Papa Joffre?’ asked Pierrot, having never heard the name before.

‘He was a great general in the war,’ said Maman, lifting a pile of clothes out of a basket and placing it next to her ironing board. ‘A hero to our people.’

‘To
your
people,’ said Papa.

‘Remember that you married a Frenchwoman,’ said Maman, turning to him angrily.

‘Because I loved her,’ replied Papa. ‘Pierrot, did I ever tell you about when I saw your mother for the first time? It was a couple of years after the Great War ended: I had arranged to meet my sister Beatrix during her lunch break, and when I got to the department store where she worked, she was talking to one of the new assistants, a shy creature who had only started that week. I took one look at her and knew immediately that this was the girl I was going to marry.’

Pierrot smiled; he loved it when his father told stories like this.

‘I opened my mouth to speak but couldn’t find any words. It was as if my brain had just gone to sleep. And so I just stood there, staring, saying nothing.’

‘I thought there was something wrong with him,’ said Maman, smiling too at the memory.

‘Beatrix had to shake me by the shoulders,’ said Papa, laughing at his own foolishness.

‘If it wasn’t for her I would never have agreed to go out with you,’ added Maman. ‘She told me that I should take a chance. That you were not as daft as you seemed.’

‘Why don’t we ever see Aunt Beatrix?’ asked Pierrot, for he had heard her name on a few occasions over the years but had never met her. She never came to visit and never wrote any letters.

‘Because we don’t,’ said Papa, the smile leaving his face now as his expression changed.

‘But why not?’

‘Leave it, Pierrot,’ he said.

‘Yes, leave it, Pierrot,’ repeated Maman, her face clouding over now too. ‘Because that’s what we do in this house. We push away the people we love, we don’t talk about things that matter and we don’t allow anyone to help us.’

And just like that, a happy conversation was spoiled.

‘He eats like a pig,’ said Papa a few minutes later, crouching down and looking Pierrot in the eye, curling his fingers into claws. ‘Papa Joffre, I mean. Like a rat chewing his way along a cob of corn.’

Week after week, Papa complained about how low his wages were, how M. and Mme Abrahams spoke down to him and how the Parisians had grown increasingly mean with their tips. ‘This is why we never have any money,’ he grumbled. ‘They’re all so tight-fisted. Especially the Jews – they’re the worst. And they come in all the time because they say that Mme Abrahams makes the best gefilte fish and latkes in all of Western Europe.’

‘Anshel is Jewish,’ said Pierrot quietly, because he often saw his friend leaving for temple with his mother.

‘Anshel is one of the good ones,’ muttered Papa. ‘They say every barrel of good apples contains a single rotten one. Well, that works the other way round too—’

‘We never have any money,’ said Maman, interrupting him, ‘because you spend most of what you earn on wine. And you shouldn’t speak about our neighbours like that. Remember how—’

‘You think I bought this?’ he asked, picking up a bottle and turning it round to show her the label – the same house wine that the restaurant used. ‘Your mother can be very naïve sometimes,’ he added in German to Pierrot.

Despite everything, Pierrot loved spending time with his father. Once a month Papa would take him to the Tuileries Garden, where he would name the different trees and plants that lined the walkways, explaining how each one changed as season followed season. His own parents, Papa told him, had been avid horticulturalists and had loved anything to do with the land. ‘But they lost it all, of course,’ he added. ‘Their farm was taken from them. All their hard work destroyed. They never recovered.’

On the way home he bought ice creams from a street-seller, and when Pierrot’s fell to the ground, his father gave him his instead.

These were the things that Pierrot tried to remember whenever there was trouble at home. Only a few weeks later, an argument broke out in their front parlour when some neighbours – different ones to those who had objected to Pierrot singing
La Marseillaise
in German – began discussing politics. Voices were raised, old grievances aired, and when they left, his parents got into a terrible fight.

‘If you’d only stop drinking,’ Maman cried. ‘Alcohol makes you say the most terrible things. Can’t you see how much you upset people?’

‘I drink to forget,’ shouted Papa. ‘You haven’t seen the things I’ve seen. You don’t have these images going around in your head day and night.’

‘But it’s so long ago,’ she said, stepping closer to him and reaching across to take his arm. ‘Please, Wilhelm, I know how much it hurts you, but perhaps it’s because you refuse to talk about it sensibly. Maybe if you shared your pain with me—’

Émilie never got to finish that sentence, for at that moment Wilhelm did a very bad thing; a thing he had done for the first time a few months earlier, swearing that he would never do again, although he had broken this promise several times since then. As upset as she was, Pierrot’s mother always found some way to excuse his behaviour, particularly when she found her son crying in his bedroom at the frightening scenes he had witnessed.

‘You mustn’t blame him,’ she said.

‘But he hurts you,’ said Pierrot, looking up with tears in his eyes. On the bed, D’Artagnan glanced from one to the other before jumping down and nuzzling his nose into his master’s side; the little dog always knew when Pierrot was upset.

‘He’s ill,’ replied Émilie, holding a hand to her face. ‘And when someone we love is ill, it’s our job to help them get better. If they will let us. But if they won’t . . . She took a deep breath before speaking again. ‘Pierrot,’ she said. ‘How would you feel if we were to move away?’

‘All of us?’

She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Just you and me.’

‘And what about Papa?’

Maman sighed, and Pierrot could see the tears forming in her eyes. ‘All I know,’ she said, ‘is that things can’t go on as they are.’

The last time Pierrot saw his father was on a warm May evening, shortly after his fourth birthday, when once again the kitchen was littered with empty bottles and Papa began shouting and banging the sides of his head with his hands, complaining that they were in there, they were all in there, they were coming to get their revenge on him – phrases that made no sense to Pierrot. Papa reached over to the dresser and threw handfuls of plates, bowls and cups on the floor, smashing them into hundreds of pieces. Maman held her arms out to him, pleading with him in an attempt to calm his temper, but he lashed out, punching her in the face, and screaming words that were so terrible, Pierrot covered his ears and ran into his bedroom with D’Artagnan and they hid in the wardrobe together. Pierrot was shaking and trying not to cry as the little dog, who hated any kind of upset, whimpered and curled himself into the boy’s body.

Pierrot didn’t leave the wardrobe for hours, until everything had grown quiet again, and when he did his father had vanished and his mother was lying on the floor, motionless, her face bloody and bruised. D’Artagnan walked over cautiously, bowing his head and licking her ear repeatedly in an attempt to wake her, but Pierrot simply stared in disbelief. Summoning all his courage, he ran downstairs to Anshel’s apartment, where he pointed towards the staircase, unable to utter a word of explanation. Mme Bronstein, who must have heard the earlier commotion through her ceiling but was too frightened to intervene, ran upstairs, taking the steps two or three at a time. Meanwhile Pierrot looked across at his friend, one boy unable to speak, the other unable to hear. Noticing a pile of pages on the table behind him, he walked over, sat down, and began to read Anshel’s latest story. Somehow he found that losing himself in a world that wasn’t his own was a welcome escape.

For several weeks there was no word from Papa and Pierrot both longed for and dreaded his return, and then one morning word came to them that Wilhelm had died when he fell beneath a train that was making its way from Munich to Penzberg, the same town where he had been born and in which he had spent his childhood. When he heard the news, Pierrot went to his room, locked the door, looked at the dog, who was snoozing on the bed, and spoke very calmly.

‘Papa is looking down at us now, D’Artagnan,’ he said. ‘And one day I am going to make him proud of me.’

Afterwards M. and Mme Abrahams offered Émilie work as a waitress, which Mme Bronstein said was in poor taste as they were simply offering her the job that her dead husband had had before her. But Maman, who knew that she and Pierrot needed the money, accepted gratefully.

The restaurant was located halfway between Pierrot’s school and home, and he would read and draw in the small room downstairs every afternoon while the staff wandered in and out, taking their breaks, chatting about the customers and generally fussing over him. Mme Abrahams always brought him down a plate of whatever that day’s special was, with a bowl of ice cream to follow.

Pierrot spent three years, from the ages of four to seven, sitting in that room every afternoon while Maman served customers upstairs, and although he never spoke of him, he thought of his father every day, picturing him standing there, changing into his uniform in the morning, counting his tips at the end of the day.

Years later, when Pierrot looked back on his childhood, he experienced complicated emotions. Although he was very sad about his father, he had plenty of friends, enjoyed school, and he and Maman lived happily together. Paris was flourishing and the streets were always buzzing with people and energy.

But in 1936, on Émilie’s birthday, what should have been a happy day took a turn towards tragedy. In the evening Mme Bronstein and Anshel had come upstairs with a small cake to celebrate, and Pierrot and his friend were munching on a second slice when, quite unexpectedly, Maman began to cough. At first Pierrot thought that a piece of cake must have gone down the wrong way, but the coughing continued much longer than seemed normal, and only when Mme Bronstein gave her a glass of water to drink did it come to an end. When she recovered herself, however, her eyes appeared bloodshot and she pressed a hand to her chest as if she was in pain.

‘I’m fine,’ she said as her breathing returned to normal. ‘I must be getting a chill, that’s all.’

‘But, my dear . . .’ said Mme Bronstein, her face growing pale as she pointed towards the handkerchief that Émilie held in her hands. Pierrot glanced across and his mouth fell open when he saw three small spots of blood in the centre of the linen. Maman stared at them too for a few moments before crumpling it up and tucking it away inside her pocket. Then, placing both hands carefully on the arms of her chair, she rose, smoothed down her dress and attempted to smile.

‘Émilie, are you quite all right?’ asked Mme Bronstein, standing up, and Pierrot’s mother nodded quickly.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Probably just a throat infection, although I am a little tired. Perhaps I should get some sleep. You were so thoughtful to bring the cake, but if you and Anshel don’t mind . . .?’

‘Of course, of course,’ replied Mme Bronstein, tapping her son on the shoulder and making her way towards the door with more urgency than Pierrot had ever seen before. ‘If you need anything, just stamp on the floor a few times and I’ll be up in a flash.’

Maman didn’t cough any more that night, or for several days afterwards, but then, while she was waiting on some customers in the restaurant, she seemed to lose control of herself entirely and was brought downstairs to where Pierrot was playing chess with one of the waiters. This time, her face was grey and her handkerchief was not spotted with blood but covered in it. Perspiration ran down her face, and when Dr Chibaud arrived, he took one look at her and called for an ambulance. Within an hour she was lying in a bed in the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris hospital as the doctors examined her and whispered amongst themselves, their voices low and worried.

Pierrot spent that night in the Bronsteins’ apartment, top-to-tail in the bed with Anshel, while D’Artagnan snored on the floor. He felt very frightened, of course, and would have liked to talk to his friend about what was happening, but as good as his sign language was, it was no use to him in the dark.

He visited Maman every day for a week, and each day she seemed to be struggling for breath more and more. He was the only one with her on that Sunday afternoon when her breathing began to slow down entirely and her fingers fell loose around his own; then her head slipped to one side of the pillow, her eyes still open, and he knew that she was gone.

Pierrot sat very still for a few minutes before quietly pulling the curtain around the bed and returning to the chair next to his mother, holding her hand and refusing to let go. Finally an elderly nurse arrived, saw what had happened and told him that she needed to move Émilie to a different place where her body could be prepared for the undertaker. At these words, Pierrot burst into tears that he felt might never end, and clung to his mother’s body while the nurse tried to console him. It took a long time for him to calm down, and when he did, his entire body felt broken on the inside. He had never known pain like this before.

‘I want her to have this,’ he said, retrieving a photograph of his father from his pocket and placing it next to her on the bed.

The nurse nodded and promised that she would ensure the picture remained with Maman.

‘Do you have any family I can call for you?’ she asked.

‘No,’ said Pierrot, shaking his head, unable to look her in the eye in case he saw either pity or lack of interest there. ‘No, there’s no one. It’s just me. I’m all alone now.’

Born only a year apart, neither Simone nor Adèle Durand had ever married, and seemed content in each other’s company, even though the sisters were not at all alike.

Simone, the elder of the two, was surprisingly tall, towering over most men. A very beautiful woman with dark skin and deep brown eyes, she had an artistic soul and liked nothing more than to sit at the piano for hours on end, lost in her music. Adèle, on the other hand, was rather short, with a fat bottom and a sallow complexion, and waddled around like a duck, a species of bird she rather resembled. She was constantly active and easily the more sociable of the pair, but didn’t have a musical note in her head.