‘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.’