‘I love you too, Papa,’ said Pierrot. ‘But I love you most when you’re carrying me on your shoulders and pretending to be a horse. I don’t like it when you sit in the armchair and won’t talk to me or Maman.’
‘I don’t like those moments either,’ said Papa quietly. ‘But sometimes it’s as if a dark cloud has settled over me and I can’t get it to move on. That’s why I drink. It helps me forget.’
‘Forget what?’
‘The war. The things I saw.’ He closed his eyes as he whispered, ‘The things I did.’
Pierrot swallowed, almost afraid of asking the question. ‘What did you do?’
Papa offered him a sad smile. ‘Whatever I did, I did for my country,’ he said. ‘You can understand that, can’t you?’
‘Yes, Papa,’ said Pierrot, who wasn’t sure what his father meant but thought it sounded valiant nevertheless. ‘I’d be a soldier too, if it would make you proud of me.’
Papa looked at his son and placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘Just make sure you pick the right side,’ he said.
For several weeks after this he stopped drinking. And then, just as abruptly as he had given up, that dark cloud he had spoken of returned and he started again.
Papa worked as a waiter in a local restaurant, disappearing every morning around ten o’clock and returning at three before leaving again at six for the dinner service. On one occasion he came home in a bad mood and said that someone named Papa Joffre had been in the restaurant for lunch, seated at one of his tables; he had refused to serve him until his employer, M. Abrahams, said that if he didn’t, he could go home and never return.
‘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.