The Boy at the Top of the Mountain Read online

  ‘Who am I?’ asked the man, laughing at the audacity of the boy’s question. ‘I’m the fellow who’s going to tan your hide if you don’t hop to it.’

  Pierrot’s eyes opened wide. He hadn’t been in Orleans for more than a couple of minutes and he was already being threatened with violence. He shook his head defiantly and sat down on his suitcase. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m not supposed to go anywhere with strangers.’

  ‘Don’t worry, we won’t be strangers for long,’ said the man, his face softening a little as he smiled. He was about fifty years old and looked a little like M. Abrahams from the restaurant, except for the fact that he hadn’t shaved in a few days and was wearing scruffy old clothes that didn’t match very well. ‘You’re Pierrot Fischer, aren’t you? It said so on your lapel anyway. The Durand sisters sent me to get you. My name’s Houper. I do a few odd jobs for them now and then. And sometimes I come to collect the orphans from the train station. The ones who travel on their own, that is.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Pierrot, standing up now. ‘I thought they would come to fetch me themselves.’

  ‘And leave all those little monsters with the run of the place? Not likely. The place would be in ruins by the time they got back.’ The man stepped forward and his tone changed as he lifted Pierrot’s suitcase. ‘Look, there’s nothing to be frightened of,’ he said. ‘It’s a good place. They’re very kind, the pair of them. So what do you think – will you come with me?’

  Pierrot glanced around. The train had moved on now, and from where he was standing there was nothing to be seen for miles except fields. He knew that he had no choice.

  ‘All right,’ he said.

  Within the hour, Pierrot found himself seated in a neat and orderly office with two enormous windows looking over a well-tended garden. The Durand sisters looked him up and down as if he was something they were considering buying at a fair.

  ‘How old are you?’ asked Simone, holding up a pair of spectacles to examine him before letting them fall and hang loose around her neck.

  ‘I’m seven,’ said Pierrot.

  ‘You can’t be seven, you’re far too small.’

  ‘I’ve always been small,’ replied Pierrot. ‘But I plan on getting bigger one day.’

  ‘Do you indeed?’ said Simone doubtfully.

  ‘Such a lovely age, seven,’ said Adèle, clapping her hands together and smiling. ‘Children are always so happy then, and so full of wonder about the world.’

  ‘My dear,’ interrupted Simone, laying a hand on her sister’s arm. ‘The boy’s mother has just died. I doubt that he is feeling particularly jovial.’

  ‘Oh, of course, of course,’ said Adèle, her face growing serious now. ‘You must still be grieving. It’s a terrible thing, the loss of a loved one. A terrible thing. My sister and I understand that only too well. I only meant that boys of your age are rather charming, I think. You only start to turn nasty when you hit thirteen or fourteen. Not that you will go that way, I’m sure. I dare say you will be one of the good ones.’

  ‘My dear,’ repeated Simone quietly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ replied Adèle. ‘I’m prattling on, amn’t I? Let me say this then.’ She cleared her throat as if she was about to address a room full of unruly factory workers. ‘We are very happy to have you here with us, Pierrot. I have no doubt that you will be a tremendous asset to what we like to think of as our little family here at the orphanage. And my goodness, aren’t you a handsome little fellow! You have the most extraordinary blue eyes. I used to own a spaniel with eyes just like yours. Not that I’m comparing you to a dog, of course. That would be terribly rude. I only meant that you put me in mind of him, that’s all. Simone, don’t Pierrot’s eyes remind you of Casper’s?’

  Simone raised an eyebrow and glanced at the boy for a moment before shaking her head. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, but they do, they really do!’ declared Adèle with so much delight that Pierrot began to wonder whether she thought her dead dog had come back to life in human form. ‘Now, first things first.’ And here her expression turned quite serious. ‘We were both so sorry to hear about what happened with your dear mother. So young and such a wonderful provider, from what we’ve been told. And after all she’d been through in her life too. It seems terribly cruel that someone with so much to live for should be taken away from you just when you need her the most. And I dare say she loved you very much. Don’t you agree, Simone? Don’t you think that Mme Fischer must have loved Pierrot very much?’

  Simone looked up from a ledger into which she was writing details of Pierrot’s height and physical condition. ‘I imagine that most mothers love their sons,’ she said. ‘It’s hardly worth commenting upon.’

  ‘And your father,’ continued Adèle. ‘He passed away a few years ago too, isn’t that right?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pierrot.

  ‘And you have no other family?’

  ‘No. Well, my father had a sister, I think, but I’ve never met her. She never came to visit. She probably doesn’t even know that I’m alive or that my parents are dead. I don’t have her address.’

  ‘Oh, what a shame!’

  ‘How long will I have to stay here?’ Pierrot asked, his attention drawn to the many pictures and drawings on display. On the desk he noticed a photograph of a man and woman seated on two chairs with a large gap between them, such serious expressions on their faces that he wondered whether they had been captured in the middle of an argument; he knew by looking at them that they were the sisters’ parents. Another photograph, placed on the opposite corner of the desk, revealed two little girls holding hands with a slightly younger boy who was standing between them. On the wall was a third photograph, a portrait of a young man with a pencil moustache wearing a French army uniform. The picture was taken in profile, so from where it hung, the young man was staring out of the window into the gardens beyond with a rather wistful expression on his face.

  ‘Many of our orphans are placed with good families within a month or two of their arrival,’ said Adèle, sitting down on the couch and indicating that Pierrot should take a seat next to her. ‘There are so many wonderful men and women who would like to start a family but have not been blessed with children of their own; others simply want to bring an extra brother or sister into their home out of kindness and charity. You must never underestimate how kind people can be, Pierrot.’

  ‘Or how cruel,’ muttered Simone from behind her desk, and Pierrot glanced across at her in surprise but she didn’t look up.

  ‘We’ve had some children who were with us for only a few days or weeks,’ continued Adèle, ignoring her sister’s remark. ‘And some who were here a little longer, of course. But once, a little boy of your age was brought to us in the morning and he was gone again by lunch time. We barely had a chance to get to know him at all, did we, Simone?’

  ‘No,’ said Simone.

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter,’ said Adèle. ‘The point is that you can’t predict when someone will find a family. Something like that might happen to you, Pierrot.’

  ‘It’s almost five o’clock,’ he replied. ‘The day’s almost over.’

  ‘I only meant—’

  ‘And how many never get adopted?’ he asked.

  ‘Hmm? What’s that?’

  ‘How many children never get adopted?’ he repeated. ‘How many live here until they’re grown up?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Adèle, her smile fading a little. ‘Well, it’s difficult to put a number on that, of course. It happens occasionally, of course it does, but I very much doubt that it will happen with you. Why, any family would be delighted to have you! But let’s not worry about that for now. However long or short your stay may be, we’ll try to make it as enjoyable as possible. For now the important thing is that you get settled in, meet your new friends and start to feel at home. You may have heard some bad stories about things that go on in orphanages,
Pierrot, because there are an awful lot of people who tell terrible stories – and then there was that horrible Englishman, Mr Dickens, who gave us all a bad name with his novels – but you can rest assured that nothing untoward goes on in our establishment. We run a happy house for all our boys and girls, and if there’s ever a moment when you feel frightened or alone, you simply have to come looking for either Simone or me, and we will be happy to help you. Won’t we, Simone?’

  ‘Adèle is usually quite easy to find,’ replied the older sister.

  ‘Where will I sleep?’ asked Pierrot. ‘Do I get my own room?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Adèle. ‘Even Simone and I don’t have our own rooms. This isn’t the Palace of Versailles, you know! No, we have dormitories here. Separate dormitories for boys and girls, of course, so you don’t need to worry about that. They each have ten beds in them, although the room you’re going into is a little quiet at the moment so you’ll only be the seventh boy in there. You can take your pick of the empty beds. All we ask is that when you choose one, you stick with it. It makes everything easier on wash day. You’ll take a bath every Wednesday night, although’ – and here she leaned forward and sniffed the air a little – ‘it might be for the best if you take one this evening too, just to wash the dust of Paris and the filth of the train away. You’re a little ripe, dear. We rise at six-thirty, then there’s breakfast, school, lunch, a little more school, then games, dinner and bed. You’ll love it here, Pierrot, I’m sure you will. And we will do our very best to find a wonderful family for you. That’s the funny thing about this line of work, you see. We’re so happy to see you arrive but we’re even happier to see you leave. Isn’t that right, Simone?’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Simone.

  Adèle stood up and invited Pierrot to follow her so she could show him around the orphanage, but as he walked towards the door, he noticed something sparkling inside a small glass cabinet and walked over to look at it. He pressed his face against the glass and squinted as he stared at a circle of bronze with a figure at its centre hanging from a strip of red and white striped fabric. A separate bronze bar was clipped to the material, inscribed with the words Engagé Volontaire. At the base of the cabinet stood a small candle and another photograph, a smaller one, of the man with the pencil moustache, smiling and waving from a train as it pulled out of a station. He recognized the platform immediately, for it was the same one where he had disembarked from the Paris train earlier in the day.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Pierrot, pointing at the medal. ‘And who’s he?’

  ‘That has nothing to do with you,’ said Simone, standing up now, and Pierrot spun round, feeling a little nervous as he saw the serious expression on her face. ‘You are never to touch that or interfere with it in any way. Adèle, take him to his room. Now, please!’

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Letter from a Friend and a Letter from a Stranger

  Things were not quite as wonderful in the orphanage as Adèle Durand had suggested. The beds were hard and the sheets were thin. When the food was plentiful it was usually tasteless, though when it was scarce it was usually good.

  Pierrot did his best to make friends, although it wasn’t easy when the other children knew each other so well and were wary of allowing newcomers into their groups. There were a few who liked reading, but they wouldn’t let Pierrot join their discussions because he hadn’t read the same books as they had. There were others who had spent months creating a miniature village from wood they’d gathered in the nearby forest, but they shook their heads and said that since Pierrot didn’t know the difference between a bevel and a block plane, they couldn’t allow him to ruin something they’d worked so hard on. A group of boys who played soccer in the grounds every afternoon, naming themselves after their favourite players in the French national team – Courtois, Mattler, Delfour – did allow Pierrot to play with them, once, in goal, but after his side lost eleven–nil they said he wasn’t tall enough to jump for the high shots and all the other positions on the teams were taken.

  ‘Sorry, Pierrot,’ they said, not sounding sorry at all.

  The only person he spent much time with was a girl a year or two older than him called Josette, who had arrived at the orphanage three years earlier after her parents were killed in a train crash near Toulouse. She’d been adopted twice already, but on both occasions she was sent back like an unwanted parcel when the families declared her ‘too disruptive’ for their households.

  ‘The first couple were awful,’ she told Pierrot as they sat under a tree one morning, their toes sinking into the dew-dampened grass. ‘They refused to call me Josette. They said they’d always wanted a daughter by the name of Marie-Louise. The second just wanted an unpaid servant. They had me cleaning floors and washing dishes from morning till night like Cinderella. So I caused mayhem until they let me leave. Anyway, I like Simone and Adèle,’ she added. ‘Maybe someday I’ll allow myself to be adopted. But not just yet. I’m perfectly happy where I am.’

  The worst orphan of all was a boy named Hugo, who had lived there his entire life – eleven years – and was considered the most important but also the most intimidating child under the Durand sisters’ care. He had long hair that ran down to his shoulders and slept in the same dormitory as Pierrot, who’d made the mistake of choosing the bed next to him on his arrival: he snored so loudly that Pierrot sometimes had to bury himself deep down under the sheets to block out the noise. He even took to putting ripped-up pieces of newspaper in his ears at night to see whether that might help. Simone and Adèle never put Hugo up for adoption, and when couples arrived to meet the children, he stayed in his room, never washing his face or putting on a clean shirt or smiling at the adults like the rest of the orphans did.

  Hugo spent most of his time wandering the corridors in search of someone to bully. And Pierrot, who was small and thin, was the obvious target.

  The bullying took several forms, none of which was particularly imaginative. Sometimes Hugo would wait until Pierrot was asleep before placing his left hand in a bowl of warm water – which would lead Pierrot to do something that he had generally stopped doing by the time he was three years old. Sometimes he would hold the back of Pierrot’s seat when he was trying to sit down in class and force him to keep standing until the teacher scolded him. Sometimes he would hide his towel after his bath, leaving Pierrot to run red-faced back to the dormitory, where all the other boys would start laughing and pointing at him. And sometimes he relied on more traditional and time-proven methods – simply waiting for Pierrot to come round a corner, when he would jump on him, pull his hair, punch him in the stomach and leave him with torn clothes and bruises.

  ‘Who’s doing this to you?’ asked Adèle when she found him sitting on his own by the lake one afternoon, examining a cut on his arm. ‘If there’s one thing I won’t stand for, Pierrot, it’s bullying.’

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ said Pierrot, unable to lift his eyes from the ground. He didn’t like the idea of being a snitch.

  ‘But you must,’ she insisted. ‘Otherwise there’s nothing I can do to help you. Is it Laurent? He’s been in trouble for this sort of thing before.’

  ‘No, it’s not Laurent,’ said Pierrot, shaking his head.

  ‘Sylvestre then?’ she asked. ‘That boy is always up to no good.’

  ‘No,’ said Pierrot. ‘It’s not Sylvestre either.’

  Adèle looked away and sighed deeply. ‘It’s Hugo, isn’t it?’ she said after a long silence, and something in her tone made Pierrot realize that she had known it was Hugo all along but had hoped she might be wrong.

  Pierrot said nothing; simply kicked a few pebbles with the tip of his right shoe and watched as they tumbled down the bank and disappeared beneath the surface of the water. ‘Can I go back to the dormitory?’ he asked.

  Adèle nodded, and as he walked back across the gardens, he knew that her eyes were watching him all the way.

  The following afternoon Pierrot and Josette were taking a walk
through the grounds in search of a family of frogs they’d encountered a few days earlier; he was telling her about the letter he’d received that morning from Anshel.

  ‘What do you talk about in your letters?’ asked Josette, rather intrigued by this idea as she never received any mail.

  ‘Well, he’s looking after my dog, D’Artagnan,’ replied Pierrot. ‘So he tells me all about him. And he lets me know what’s going on in the streets where I grew up. Apparently there was a riot nearby. I’m quite glad I missed that, though.’

  Josette had read about the riot for herself a week earlier, in an article that declared that all Jews should be guillotined. But then more and more of the newspapers were carrying articles condemning the Jews and wishing that they would all just go away, and she read each one intently.

  ‘And he sends me his stories,’ continued Pierrot, ‘because he wants to be a—’

  Before he could finish his sentence, Hugo and his two pals, Gérard and Marc, appeared from behind a cluster of trees, carrying sticks.

  ‘Well, look who it is,’ said Hugo, grinning as he rubbed the back of his hand against his nose to wipe away a long stream of something disgusting. ‘If it isn’t the happy couple, M. and Mme Fischer.’

  ‘Go away, Hugo,’ said Josette, trying to brush past him, but he jumped in front of her and shook his head, holding his two sticks in a X shape before him.

  ‘This is my land,’ he said. ‘Anyone who walks through here must pay the forfeit.’

  Josette sighed deeply as if she couldn’t believe how annoying boys could be, and folded her arms, staring directly at him but refusing to give ground. Pierrot held back, wishing they had never come out here at all.

  ‘All right then,’ she said. ‘What’s the forfeit?’

  ‘Five francs,’ said Hugo.

  ‘I’ll owe it to you.’

  ‘Then I’ll have to attach interest. Another franc for every day you go without paying.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Josette. ‘Let me know when it hits a million and I’ll get in touch with my bank to make the transfer to your account.’