The Boy at the Top of the Mountain Read online

  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.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Medal in the Cabinet

  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.

  The sisters grew up in a large mansion about eighty miles to the south of Paris in the city of Orleans, where, five hundred years before, Joan of Arc had famously lifted the city’s siege. When they were very young they believed that they belonged to the largest family in France, for there were almost fifty other children, aged from just a few weeks old to seventeen, living in the dormitories on the third, fourth and fifth floors of their house. Some were friendly, some were angry, some were shy and some were bullies, but they all had one thing in common: they were orphans. Their voices and footsteps were audible from the family quarters on the first floor below as they talked before
bedtime or ran around in the morning, shrieking as their bare feet skittered along the cold marble floors. But although Simone and Adèle shared a home with them, they felt separated from the other children in a way that they did not fully understand until they were older.

  M. and Mme Durand, the girls’ parents, had set up the orphanage after they married and run it until their deaths with some very strict policies about who could be admitted and who could not. When they were gone the sisters took over, devoting themselves entirely to the care of children who had been left on their own in the world; and changing some of those policies in important ways.

  ‘Every child who is on their own will be welcome,’ they declared. ‘Colour, race or creed mean nothing to us.’

  Simone and Adèle were exceptionally close, walking around the grounds together every day as they examined the flower beds and gave instructions to the gardener. Apart from their physical appearance, the thing that truly distinguished the sisters was that Adèle could scarcely seem to stop talking from the moment she woke in the morning until the minute she fell asleep at night, while Simone rarely spoke at all, and when she did it was in brief sentences, as if each breath might cost her energy that she could scarcely afford to waste.

  Pierrot met the Durand sisters almost a month after his mother’s death, when he boarded a train at the Gare d’Austerlitz, wearing his best clothes and a brand-new scarf that Mme Bronstein had purchased for him in the Galeries Lafayette as a parting gift the afternoon before. She, Anshel and D’Artagnan had come to the station to see him off, and with every step he took Pierrot felt his heart sinking a little deeper inside his chest. He was frightened and lonely, filled with grief for Maman, and wished that he and his dog could move in with his best friend. In fact, he had stayed with Anshel in the weeks following the funeral, and had watched as Mme Bronstein and her son went to temple together on the Sabbath, even asking whether he could go with them; but she had said that wasn’t a good idea right now and that he should take D’Artagnan out for a walk in the Champ de Mars instead. The days went on, and Mme Bronstein returned one afternoon with one of her friends, and he overheard the visitor saying that she had a cousin who had adopted a Gentile child and he’d quickly become part of the family.

  ‘The problem isn’t that he’s a Gentile, Ruth,’ said Mme Bronstein. ‘The problem is that I simply don’t have enough money to keep him. I don’t have much, that’s the truth of it. Levi left me with very little. Oh, I put on a good show, or try to, but it’s not easy for a widow on her own. And what I have I need for Anshel.’

  ‘You have to look after your own first, of course you do,’ said the lady. ‘But isn’t there anyone who could—’

  ‘I’ve tried. Believe me, I’ve spoken to everyone I can think of. I don’t suppose you’d . . .’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. Times are hard, you’ve said so yourself. And besides, life isn’t getting any easier for Jews in Paris, is it? The boy might be better off in a family more like his own.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t even have asked.’

  ‘Of course you should. You’re doing your best for the boy. That’s who you are. That’s who we are. But when it’s not possible, it’s not possible. So when will you tell him?’

  ‘Tonight, I think. It’s not going to be easy.’

  Pierrot went back to Anshel’s room and puzzled over this conversation, before looking up the word Gentile in a dictionary and wondering what that had to do with anything anyway. He sat there for a long time, tossing Anshel’s yarmulke, which hung from the back of a chair, between his hands; later, when Mme Bronstein came in to speak to him, he was wearing it on his head.

  ‘Take that off,’ she snapped, reaching forward and grabbing it before putting it back where he had found it. It was the first time in his life she’d ever spoken to him harshly. ‘You don’t play with something like this. It’s not a toy, it’s sacred.’

  Pierrot said nothing, but felt a mixture of embarrassment and distress. He wasn’t allowed to go to temple, he wasn’t allowed to wear his best friend’s cap; it was obvious to him that he wasn’t wanted there. And when she told him where he was being sent, there was simply no doubt about it.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Pierrot,’ said Mme Bronstein after she’d finished explaining things to him. ‘But I have heard only good things about this orphanage. I’m sure you’ll be happy there. And perhaps a wonderful family will adopt you soon.’

  ‘But what about D’Artagnan?’ asked Pierrot, looking down at the little dog, who was snoozing on the floor.

  ‘We can look after him,’ said Mme Bronstein. ‘He likes bones, doesn’t he?’

  ‘He loves bones.’

  ‘Well, they’re free, thanks to M. Abrahams. He said he’d let me have a few every day for nothing because he and his wife cared for your mother so deeply.’

  Pierrot said nothing; he was sure that if things were different Maman would have taken Anshel in. Despite what Mme Bronstein had said, it must have had something to do with the fact that he was a Gentile. For now, he was simply frightened by the idea of being alone in the world, and felt sad that Anshel and D’Artagnan would have each other while he would have no one at all.

  I hope I don’t forget how to do this, signed Pierrot as he waited with his friend on the station concourse that morning while Mme Bronstein purchased his one-way ticket.

  You just said that you hope you won’t become an eagle, signed Anshel, laughing and showing his friend the signs that he should have made.

  See? signed Pierrot, wishing that he could throw all the different shapes in the air and let them fall back into his fingers in the proper order. I’m already forgetting.

  No you’re not. You’re still learning, that’s all.

  You’re so much better at it than I am.

  Anshel smiled. I have to be.

  Pierrot turned as he heard the sound of the steam escaping from the valves of the train’s smoke box and the harsh blast of the conductor’s whistle, a furious call-to-platform that made his stomach turn over in anxiety. There was a part of him, of course, that was a little excited about this bit of his journey, for he’d never been on a train before, but he just wished that the trip would never come to an end because he was scared of what might be waiting for him at the other end.

  We can write to each other, Anshel, signed Pierrot. We must never lose touch.

  Every week.

  Pierrot made the sign of the fox, Anshel made the sign of the dog, and they held the two symbols in the air to represent their eternal friendship. They wanted to give each other a hug, but there were so many people around that they felt a little embarrassed and so shook hands instead as Pierrot took his leave of them.

  ‘Goodbye, Pierrot,’ said Mme Bronstein, leaning down to give him a kiss, and the noise of the train was so loud now, and the bustle of the crowds so overwhelming, that it was almost impossible to hear her.

  ‘It’s because I’m not a Jew, isn’t it?’ said Pierrot, looking directly at her. ‘You don’t like Gentiles and you don’t want one to live with you.’

  ‘What?’ she asked, standing up straight and looking shocked. ‘Pierrot, whatever gave you that idea? That was the last thing on my mind! Anyway, you’re a smart boy. Surely you can see how attitudes towards Jews are changing here – the names we get called, the resentment people seem to feel towards us.’

  ‘But if I was a Jew you’d find a way to keep me with you, I know you would.’

  ‘You’re wrong, Pierrot. I’m just thinking about your safety and—’

  ‘All aboard!’ cried the conductor loudly. ‘Last call! All aboard!’

  ‘Goodbye, Anshel,’ Pierrot said, turning away from her and making his way up the step into the carriage.

  ‘Pierrot!’ cried Mme Bronstein. ‘Come back, please! Let me explain – you have it all wrong!’

  But he didn’t turn round. His time in Paris was over, he knew that now. He closed the door behind him, took a deep breath, and stepped f
orward to begin his new life.

  Within an hour and a half the conductor was tapping Pierrot on the shoulder and pointing towards the church steeples that were just coming into sight. ‘Now then,’ he said, pointing to the piece of paper that Mme Bronstein had pinned to his lapel and on which she had written his name – PIERROT FISCHER – and his destination – ORLEANS – in big black letters. ‘This is your stop.’

  Pierrot swallowed hard, took his small suitcase out from under the seat and made his way to the door just as the train pulled in. As he stepped onto the platform, he waited for the steam from the engines to clear to see whether anyone was waiting for him. A momentary panic left him wondering what he would do if no one showed up. Who would take care of him? He was only seven years old, after all, and he had no money for a ticket back to Paris. How would he eat? Where would he sleep? What would become of him?

  He felt someone tap him on the shoulder, and when he turned round a red-faced man reached down to rip the note from his collar, holding it close to his eyes before crumpling it up and throwing it away.

  ‘You’re with me,’ he said, making his way towards a horse and cart while Pierrot gazed at him, rooted to the spot. ‘Get a move on,’ he added, turning round and staring at him. ‘My time’s precious even if yours isn’t.’

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Pierrot, refusing to follow him in case he was simply being taken into servitude by some farmer who needed extra help with his harvest. Anshel had once written a story about just such a boy and it had ended badly for everyone involved.