Read The Boy at the Top of the Mountain Online

Authors: John Boyne

The Boy at the Top of the Mountain (22 page)

And then one morning he was released. About five hundred men were brought to the courtyard to be told that they could return to their families. The men looked surprised, as if they suspected it might be a trap of some sort, making their way towards the gates nervously. Only when they were a mile or two away from the camp and certain that they were not being followed did they begin to relax, at which point they looked at each other, confused by their liberation after so many years of army life, and wondered,
What do we do now?

Pieter spent much of the following years moving from place to place, seeing the destructive signs of the war in the faces of the people and the landmarks of the cities. From Remagen, he travelled north towards Cologne, where he saw how badly the city had crumbled beneath the bombs of the Royal Air Force. Everywhere he turned, buildings were half destroyed, streets were impassable, although the great cathedral at the heart of the Domkloster remained standing in spite of the number of hits it had taken. From there, he made his way west towards Antwerp, where he found work for a time at the busy port which stretched along the waterfront, living in an attic room overlooking the Schelde river.

He made a friend, a rare thing for him, as the other dockyard workers had him down as something of a loner, but this friend – a young man of his own age named Daniel – seemed to share something of Pieter’s loneliness. Even in the heat, Daniel always wore a long-sleeved shirt, when everyone else was bare-chested, and they teased him about it, saying that he was so shy he would never be able to find a girlfriend.

Occasionally they ate dinner together or went for a drink, and Daniel never mentioned his wartime experiences any more than Pieter himself did.

Once, late one evening in a bar, Daniel mentioned that it would have been his parents’ thirtieth wedding anniversary that day.

‘Would have been?’ asked Pieter.

‘They’re both dead,’ replied Daniel quietly.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘My sisters too,’ confided Daniel, his finger rubbing at an invisible mark on the table between them. ‘And my brother.’

Pieter said nothing, but knew immediately why Daniel always wore long sleeves and refused to remove his shirt. Beneath those sleeves, he knew, was a number scarred into the skin, and Daniel, scarcely able to live with the memory of what had happened to his family, was forced to see an eternal reminder every time he looked down.

The next day Pieter wrote a letter to his employer, resigning from the shipyard, and went on his way without even saying goodbye.

He took a train north to Amsterdam, where he lived for the next six years, changing vocations entirely as he trained as a teacher, securing a position at a school near the train station. He never spoke of his past, making few friends outside his job and spending most of his time alone in his room.

One Sunday afternoon, taking a stroll through the Westerpark, he stopped to listen to a musician playing the violin beneath a tree and was transported back to his childhood in Paris – those carefree days when he had visited the Tuileries Garden with his father. A crowd had gathered, and when the performer stopped to run a cake of rosin across the strings of his bow, a young woman stepped forward to throw a few coins into his upturned hat. Turning back, she glanced in Pieter’s direction, and as their eyes met, he felt his stomach contort in pain. Although they had not met in many years, he knew her instantly and it was clear that she recognized him too. The last time he saw her she had been running in tears from his bedroom in the Berghof, the fabric of her blouse ripped at the shoulder where he had pulled at it before Emma had sent him sprawling to the floor. She walked over now without any fear in her eyes and stood before him, even more beautiful than he remembered her from their shared youth. Her gaze didn’t shift; she simply stared at him as if words were unnecessary, until he could bear it no longer and lowered his eyes to the ground in shame. He hoped that she would walk away but she didn’t, she stood her ground, and when he dared to look up again, she wore an expression on her face of such contempt that he wished he could simply disappear into thin air. Turning away without a word, he made his way home.

By the end of the week he had resigned his position at the school and understood that the moment he had put off for so long had finally come.

It was time to go home.

The first place Pieter visited when he returned to France was the orphanage in Orleans, but when he arrived it was no longer fully standing. During the occupation it had been taken over by the Nazis, the children scattered to the winds as it became a centre of operations for the Germans. When it became clear that the war was coming to an end, the Nazis had fled the building, destroying portions of it as they left, but the walls were strong and it didn’t completely fall apart. It would have taken a lot of money to rebuild it, and as yet no one had stepped forward to recreate the haven it had once been for children who had no families of their own.

Walking into the office where he had first met the Durand sisters, Pieter looked for the glass cabinet that had held their brother’s medal, but it was gone, along with the sisters themselves.

The war records department, however, led him to discover that Hugo, who had bullied him when he lived there, had died a hero. As a teenage boy he had resisted the occupying forces and run several dangerous missions that saved the lives of many of his compatriots before being discovered in the act of planting a bomb near the same orphanage where he had grown up on the day a German general had come to visit. He was lined up against a wall, and reportedly refused the blindfold as the soldiers pointed their weapons at him, wanting to look his executioners in the eye as he fell.

Of Josette he could find no trace. Another missing child of the war, he realized, whose fate he would never know.

Arriving back in Paris at last, he spent his first night writing a letter to a lady who lived in Leipzig. He described in detail the actions he had taken one Christmas Eve when he was a boy, and said that while he understood that he could not expect to be forgiven, he wanted her to know how eternally regretful he would be.

He received a simple, polite reply from Ernst’s sister, who told him that she had been tremendously proud when her brother had become chauffeur to such a great man as Adolf Hitler and considered his actions in attempting to assassinate the Führer a stain on her family’s proud history.

You did what any patriot would have done
, she wrote, and Pieter read the letter in astonishment, realizing that time might move on, but the ideas of some people never would.

One afternoon a few weeks later, he found himself strolling past a bookshop in the Montmartre district, and he stopped to look at a display in the window. It had been many years since he had read a novel – the last had been
Emil and the Detectives
– but there was something there that caught his eye and made him go inside to lift the book from its stand, turning it round to look at the photograph of the author on the back.

The novel was written by Anshel Bronstein, the boy who had lived in the flat below him as a child. Of course, he remembered, he had wanted to be a writer. It seemed that his ambition had come true.

He bought the book and read it over the course of two evenings before making his way to the office of the publisher, where he said that he was an old friend of Anshel’s and would like to contact him. He was given the writer’s address and informed that he would probably find him at home as M. Bronstein spent every afternoon there, writing.

The flat was not far away, but Pieter made his way there slowly, worried about the reception that he might receive. He didn’t know whether Anshel would be able to listen to the story of his life, whether he would be able to stomach it, but he knew that he had to try. After all, it was he who had stopped responding to Ashel’s letters, telling him that they were no longer friends and that he should stop writing to him. Knocking on the door, he didn’t even know whether Anshel would remember him.

But, of course, I knew him immediately.

Usually, I don’t like it when someone comes to my door while I’m working. It’s not easy to write a novel. It takes time and patience, and to be distracted even for a moment can lead to the loss of an entire day’s work. And that afternoon, I was writing an important scene and was irritated by the interruption, but it did not take more than a moment for me to recognize the man standing at my door, trembling slightly as he looked at me. The years had passed – they had not been kind to either of us – but I would have known him anywhere.

Pierrot
, I signed, using my fingers to make the symbol of the dog, kind and loyal, with which I had christened him as a boy.

Anshel
, he signed in reply, making the symbol of the fox.

We stood staring at each other for what felt like a very long time, and then I stood back, opening the door to invite him inside. He sat down opposite me in my study and looked around at the photographs on the walls. The picture of my mother, from whom I had hidden when the soldiers rounded up the Jews on our street and whom I had last seen being bundled into a truck with so many of our neighbours. The picture of D’Artagnan, his dog, my dog; the dog that had tried to attack one of the Nazis as he captured her and been shot for his bravery. The picture of the family who had taken me in and hidden me, claiming me as their own despite the trouble it had caused them.

He said nothing for a long time, and I decided to wait until he was ready. And then finally he said that he had a story to tell; a story of a boy who had started out with love and decency in his heart but had found himself corrupted by power. The story of a boy who had committed crimes with which he would have to live for ever; a boy who had hurt people who loved him and been a party to the deaths of those who only ever showed him kindness; who had sacrificed his right to his own name and would have to spend a lifetime trying to earn it back again. The story of a man who wanted to find some way to make amends for his actions and would always remember the words of a maid named Herta, who had told him never to pretend that he hadn’t known what was going on; that such a lie would be the worst crime of all.

Do you remember when we were children?
he asked me.
Like you, I had stories to tell but could never get the words down on the page. I would have an idea, but only you could find the words. You told me that even though you might have written it, it was still my story.

I remember
, I said.

Could we be children again, do you think?

I shook my head and smiled.
Too much has happened for that to be possible
, I told him.
But you can tell me what happened after you left Paris, of course. And after that, we shall see.

‘This story will take some time to tell,’ Pierrot told me, ‘and when you hear it you might despise me, you might even want to kill me, but I am going to tell you and you can do with it what you will. Perhaps you will write about it. Or perhaps you think it would be better forgotten.’

I went over to my desk and set my novel aside. It was a trivial thing, after all, compared to this, and I could return to it one day, when I had heard everything he had to say. And then, taking a fresh notebook and fountain pen from my cabinet, I turned back to my old friend and used the only voice I have ever had – my hands – to sign three simple words that I knew he would understand.

Let us begin.

A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Every novel I write is improved immeasurably by the advice and support of wonderful friends and colleagues around the world. Many thanks to my agents, Simon Trewin, Eric Simonoff, Annemarie Blumenhagen and all at WME; my editors Annie Eaton and Natalie Doherty at Random House Children’s Publishers in the UK, Laura Godwin at Henry Holt in the USA, Kristin Cochrane, Martha Leonard and the wonderful team at Random House Canada, and all those who publish my novels around the world.

Thanks too to my husband and best friend Con.

The final sections of this novel were written at my alma mater, the University of East Anglia, Norwich, during autumn 2014 where I was teaching on the Creative Writing MA. For reminding me how wonderful it is to be a writer and forcing me to think about fiction in different ways, big thanks to some great writers of the future: Anna Pook, Bikram Sharma, Emma Miller, Graham Rushe, Molly Morris, Rowan Whiteside, Tatiana Strauss and Zakia Uddin.

About the Author

John Boyne was born in Ireland in 1971. He is the author of nine novels for adults and four for younger readers, including the international bestsellers
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
, which has sold more than six million copies worldwide,
The Absolutist
and, most recently,
Stay Where You Are and Then Leave
. His novels are published in over forty-five languages. He is married and lives in Dublin.

Also by John Boyne

Novels:

The Thief of Time

The Congress of Rough Riders

Crippen

Next of Kin

Mutiny on the Bounty

The House of Special Purpose

The Absolutist

This House is Haunted

A History of Loneliness

Novels for Younger Readers: