The Boy at the Top of the Mountain (11 page)

‘Eyes and hands off,’ said Emma, pointing at him. ‘If I come back in here and find anything missing, I’ll know who to blame. I have everything counted, Pieter, and don’t forget it.’ They stepped out into the back yard and Pierrot looked around. ‘See them over there?’ she asked, pointing at the chickens in the coop.

‘Yes,’ said Pierrot.

‘Have a look and tell me which two you think are the fattest.’

Pierrot walked over and examined them carefully. There were more than a dozen gathered together; some standing still, some hiding behind others and some pecking at the ground. ‘That one,’ he said, nodding at a chicken that was sitting down and looking about as unenthusiastic about life as a chicken possibly can. ‘And that one,’ he added, pointing at another, which was running around causing a great commotion.

‘Right then,’ said Emma, elbowing him out of the way and reaching forward to undo the lid of the coop. The chickens all started to squawk, but she reached in quickly and pulled out the two that Pierrot had chosen by their legs, standing up and holding them upside down, one in each hand.

‘Close that,’ she said, nodding at the coop.

Pierrot did as he was told.

‘Right. Now follow me over here. The rest of them don’t need to see what happens next.’

Pierrot skipped round the corner after her, wondering what on earth she was going to do. This was quite easily the most interesting thing that had taken place in days. Perhaps they were going to play a game with the chickens or put them in a race to see which was the fastest.

‘Hold this one,’ said Emma, handing the more subdued one to Pierrot, who took it reluctantly and held it by its feet as far away from his body as possible. It kept trying to turn its head to look at him, but he twisted and turned so it couldn’t peck him.

‘What happens now?’ he asked, watching as Emma placed her chicken sideways on a sawn-off tree stump that came up to her waist, and held it firmly by the body.

‘This,’ she said, reaching down with her other hand and picking up a hatchet, which she slammed down in a quick, efficient movement, slicing the chicken’s head off before letting it fall to the ground. Decapitated, the body began running around in a frenzy, before slowing down and finally collapsing, dead, on the ground.

Pierrot stared in horror and felt the world begin to spin. He reached out to steady himself against the stump, but his hand landed in a pool of the dead chicken’s blood and he screamed, falling over and letting go of his own chicken – which, having witnessed its friend’s unexpected end, made the sensible decision to run back towards the chicken coop as quickly as it could.

‘Get up, Pieter,’ said Emma, marching past him. ‘If the master comes back and finds you lying out here like this, he’ll have your guts for garters.’

There was now an almighty cacophony coming from the coop, and the bird that was shut outside was panicking as it tried to get back in. The other chickens were looking at it and screeching, but of course there was nothing they could do. Before it knew what was happening, Emma was upon it, picking it up by the legs and carrying it over to the stump where, within an instant, it met the same grisly fate. Unable to look away, Pierrot felt his stomach begin to turn.

‘If you throw up on that bird and ruin it,’ said Emma, waving the axe in the air, ‘you’ll be next. Do you hear me?’

Pierrot stumbled to his feet and looked at the carnage around him – the two chicken heads lying in the grass, the spattered blood on Emma’s apron – and ran back into the house, slamming the door shut. Even as he ran out of the kitchen and back to his room, he could hear Emma’s laughter mixing with the noise of the birds until it all become one, the sound that nightmares make.

Pierrot spent most of the next hour lying on his bed, writing a letter to Anshel about what he’d just witnessed. Of course, he’d seen headless chickens hanging in the windows of the butchers’ shops in Paris hundreds of times, and sometimes, when she had a little extra money, Maman would bring one home and sit by the kitchen table plucking the feathers from its body, telling him how they might get a week’s worth of dinners from the bird if they were careful, but he had never actually witnessed one being killed before.

Of course,
someone
has to kill them, he reasoned with himself. But he didn’t like the idea of cruelty. From as far back as he could recall he had hated any sort of violence and instinctively walked away from confrontation. There were boys at school in Paris who would start fighting at the slightest provocation, who seemed to enjoy it; when two of them raised their fists and faced off against each other, the other children would gather in a circle around them, shielding them from the teachers and urging them on. But Pierrot never watched; he could never understand the enjoyment some people got from hurting others.

And that, he told Anshel, applied to chickens too.

He didn’t say much about the things Anshel had told him in his letter – how the streets of Paris were becoming more dangerous for a boy like him; how the bakery shop owned by M. Goldblum had had its windows smashed and the word
Juden!
painted across its door; and how he had to step off the pavement and wait in the gutter if a non-Jew came along the street towards him. Pierrot ignored all this because it troubled him to think of his friend being called names and bullied.

At the end of his letter he told his friend that they should adopt a special code for writing to each other in future.

We can’t allow our correspondence to fall into enemy hands!
he wrote.
So from now on, Anshel, we won’t ever write our names at the end of our letters. Instead, we’ll use the names we gave each other when we lived together in Paris. You must use the sign of the fox, and I will use the sign of the dog.

When Pierrot went back downstairs he kept as far away from the kitchen as possible, not wanting to see what Emma might be doing to the bodies of the dead birds. He could see his aunt brushing down the sofa cushions in the living room, where there was a wonderful view across the Obersalzberg. Two flags hung down the walls – long strips of fire-engine red with white circles in the centre and four-hooked crosses within that were both impressive and scary at the same time. He walked on quietly, passing Ute and Herta, who were carrying trays of clean glasses into the main bedrooms, and then stopped at the end of the corridor, wondering what to do next.

The two doors to his left were closed, but he stepped into the library, making his way around the shelves, glancing at the titles of the books. It was a little disappointing, as none of them sounded as good as
Emil and the Detectives
; they were mostly history books and biographies of dead people. On one shelf there were a dozen copies of a single book – a book written by the master himself – and he flicked through one before replacing it on the shelf.

Finally he turned his attention to the table that stood in the centre of the room – a large rectangular desk with a map open on top of it, held down at its four corners by solid, smooth stones. He looked down and recognized the continent of Europe.

He leaned down, placing his index finger at the centre of Europe, finding Salzburg quite easily but unable to locate the town, Berchtesgaden, that stood at the bottom of the mountain. He ran his finger westward across Zurich and Basel and into France until he reached Paris. He felt a great longing for home, for Maman and Papa, as he closed his eyes and recalled lying on the grass in the Champ de Mars with Anshel next to him and D’Artagnan running around chasing unfamiliar scents.

So interested was he in it that he didn’t hear the rush of people outside, the sound of the car pulling up on the driveway or Ernst’s voice as he opened the doors to let the passengers out. Nor did he hear the welcomes extended and the sound of boots marching down the corridor towards him.

Only when he became aware that someone was watching him did he turn round. A man was standing in the doorway: not very tall, but dressed in a heavy grey overcoat with a military cap under his arm, a small moustache sitting above his upper lip. He was staring at Pierrot as he removed his gloves, slowly, methodically pulling on the fingers of each one. Pierrot’s heart jumped; he recognized him immediately from the portrait in his room.

The master.

He remembered the instructions that Aunt Beatrix had given him on dozens of occasions since his arrival and tried to follow them exactly. He stood up straight, snapped his feet together and clicked his heels once, quickly and loudly. His right arm shot out in the air, five fingers pointing directly ahead, just above the height of his shoulder. Finally he shouted in the clearest, most confident voice that he could muster the two words that he had practised over and over since his arrival at the Berghof.

‘
Heil Hitler!
’

Pierrot had been living at the Berghof for almost a year when the Führer gave him a present.

He was eight years old by now and enjoying life at the top of the Obersalzberg – even the strict daily routines that were set in place for him. Every morning he rose at seven o’clock and ran outside to the storeroom to collect the bag of feed for the chickens – a mixture of grains and seeds – before pouring it into the trough for the birds’ breakfast. Afterwards he would make his way to the kitchen, where Emma would prepare a bowl of fruit and cereal for him before he took a quick cold bath.

Ernst drove him to Berchtesgaden five mornings a week for school, and as he was the newest arrival and still spoke with a slight French accent, some of the children made fun of him, although the girl who sat next to him, Katarina, never did.

‘Don’t let them bully you, Pieter,’ she told him. ‘There’s nothing I hate more than bullies. They’re just cowards, that’s all. You have to stand up to them whenever you can.’

‘But they’re everywhere,’ replied Pierrot, telling her about the Parisian boy who had called him ‘Le Petit’ and about the way Hugo had treated him in the Durand sisters’ orphanage.

‘So you just laugh at them,’ insisted Katarina. ‘You let their words fall off you like water.’

Pierrot waited a few moments before saying what was really on his mind. ‘Don’t you ever think,’ he asked cautiously, ‘that it would be
better
to be a bully than to be bullied? At least that way no one could ever hurt you.’

Katarina turned to him in amazement. ‘No,’ she said definitively, shaking her head. ‘No, Pieter, I never think that. Not for a moment.’

‘No,’ he replied quickly, looking away. ‘No, neither do I.’

In the late afternoons he was free to run around the mountain to his heart’s content, and as the weather was usually good at that altitude – bright and crisp with the fresh aroma of pine needles in the air – there was rarely a day when he didn’t spend time outdoors. He climbed trees and headed off into the forest, venturing far from the house before finding his way back again using only his tracks, the sky and his knowledge of the landscape for guidance.

He didn’t think of Maman as much as he once had, although his father occasionally appeared in his dreams, always in uniform and usually with a rifle slung over his shoulder. He had also become less diligent in responding to Anshel, who now signed all his letters to the Berghof using the symbol that Pierrot had suggested – the sign of the fox – instead of his name. As every day passed and he hadn’t written, he felt guilty for letting his friend down, but when he read Anshel’s letters and heard about the things that were going on in Paris, he found that he simply couldn’t think of anything to say.

The Führer was not present on the Obersalzberg very often, but whenever he was due to arrive there was a great deal of panic and a lot of work that needed to be done. Ute had disappeared one night without even saying goodbye, and was replaced by Wilhelmina, a soft-headed girl who giggled constantly and would run into a different room whenever the master approached. Pierrot observed Hitler staring at her occasionally, and Emma, who had been cooking at the Berghof since 1924, thought she knew the reason why.

‘When I first came here, Pieter,’ she told him over breakfast one morning, closing the door and keeping her voice low, ‘this house wasn’t called the Berghof at all. No, the master came up with that name. Originally it was called
Haus Wachenfeld
and was a holiday home for a couple from Hamburg, the Winters. When Herr Winter died, however, his widow began renting it out to holidaymakers. That was terrible for me, because every time someone new came I had to find out what kind of food they liked and how they wanted it cooked. I remember when Herr Hitler first came to stay in 1928 with Angela and Geli—’

‘Who?’ asked Pierrot.

‘His sister and his niece. Angela once held the job that your aunt holds now. They came that summer, and Herr Hitler – he was Herr Hitler then, of course, not the Führer – informed me that he didn’t eat meat. I had never heard of such a thing and thought it terribly odd. But over time I learned how to cook the dishes he preferred, and thankfully he didn’t stop the rest of us eating what we liked.’

Almost on cue, Pierrot heard the sound of the chickens squawking in the back yard, as if they wished that the Führer would impose his dietary standards on everyone.

‘Angela was a tough woman,’ said Emma, sitting down and looking out of the window as she cast her mind back nine years. ‘She and the master argued all the time, and it always seemed to be about Geli, Angela’s daughter.’

‘Was she my age?’ asked Pierrot, picturing a young girl running around the mountain top every day like he did, which made him think that it might be a good idea to invite Katarina up there some day.

‘No, much older,’ said Emma. ‘Around twenty, I think. She was very close to the master for a time. Too close, perhaps.’

‘How do you mean?’

Emma hesitated for a moment and shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t be talking about these things. Especially not to you.’