Perfectly Ordinary People(37)

‘Pierre?’ Dad said, outraged.

‘People are saying all sorts,’ Mum commented. She said that someone had told the soldiers that Monsieur Kastler – the goat farmer – was Jewish, and that it was only luck that the Germans hadn’t believed them.

‘Can’t we just go down there and tell them it’s not true?’ Mum asked. ‘Can’t Genevieve just tell them that Pierre’s her fiancé?’

I pointed out that Pierre wasn’t my fiancé, but Dad was speaking over me, saying that no one in their right minds would go down there for anything, and that – and here was that phrase again – my mother didn’t understand ‘what they were like’.

He told me in no uncertain terms that I was not to go anywhere near the police station, and then went off to his garage, purportedly to work. As no one was driving much – petrol had become very scarce – and as the Germans hadn’t yet commandeered his garage, there wasn’t any work for him to do. But as well as having lost a leg, the war had also left him a bit deaf, and the garage was the only place he could listen to the radio without Mum constantly turning it down. He liked to sit in an old armchair he had there and smoke.

With Dad gone I asked Mum something that had been worrying me: if the Germans would be able to tell that Menashe was Jewish.

She said, ‘What they’ve done to his private parts won’t help,’ which didn’t categorically answer my question, but I was too embarrassed to pursue the subject any further. In the afternoon, Mum went out to do her cleaning and—

Your mother was a cleaner?

Yes. It was just a part-time job. She did more when Dad’s garage business wasn’t doing so well to make up the shortfall – that and her sewing. But most of her clients had either fled, or been evicted, or didn’t have money to pay her anymore. There was just one big house left, up in Rebberg, as I recall. The husband was a lawyer, I think. There were a few families like that who seemed to glide through the war without really being affected. They probably had German relatives in high places.

Anyway, Mum left me looking after the baby, and just after she’d closed the front door behind her, she returned and said, ‘And just so you know, we’re not keeping him. So don’t get too attached.’

I told her that I had no intention of ‘getting attached,’ and it was true. I knew that I didn’t want Leah’s baby to die, but that was about as far as it went. My maternal instincts were pretty non-existent in those days.

‘Good!’ Mum said. And then she added that, in the meantime, I should choose another name for him.

I asked her what she meant, and she said, ‘A non-Jewish name.’

I hadn’t thought until that point what a giveaway Menashe was.

Once she’d left again, I sat there trying out names on the baby. I thought about calling him Pierre, as Pierre was obviously very much in my thoughts, but decided that was silly and would be confusing. I thought about what was going to happen to the baby and it started to dawn on me that he perhaps would be with us for a bit, despite what Mum was saying. I decided that he’d probably be safer with a German name – there were lots of German names in Alsace anyway, so I went through some of the names from school in my mind and as I thought of them, I said them to the baby to see if he reacted. I tried Matias and Witter and Willi and Ansgar, and when I said ‘Ansgar’, he gurgled, and so it stuck. It seemed like a safe choice. You can’t get much more German than that.

So Menashe became Ansgar.

Yes. Because he gurgled at the right moment.

When Mum got home from cleaning, I went down the road to the garage. I found Dad tinkering with an old tractor engine he’d been working on for ages . . . He had the radio on and it was so loud I’d been able to hear it from outside, so I ran across the garage and switched it off.

He glared at me and said something about me being exactly like my mother, but he’d been listening to the BBC, and when I explained that I’d been able to hear it from outside, he understood.

I told him that I wanted to talk to him about something important and we both looked nervously out towards the street to check that no one was around. I explained that Matias had heard of someone who helped people escape across the border, and then started to explain further, saying that apparently there was this old carpenter chap and that all you had to do was get to— But Dad stopped me in my tracks, pressing a finger to my lips.

‘You mustn’t tell me,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t tell anyone.’

I asked him why not, and he said that it was a dangerous thing to know.

So I said I was telling him because I thought that maybe we should be thinking about doing it, because everything was getting dangerous, but Dad said he was too old and too slow to try to escape, and he was too stubborn and too proud to let anyone kick him out of his home.

It was really strange, because for the first time ever he’d talked about him instead of us, and I noticed that, because it sounded a bit like he was saying that he wouldn’t go, rather than telling me not to.

‘If they release your Pierre, though . . .’ he said, ‘and he wants to go, then that would be a different matter.’

So I asked him how that made things different, and he said it didn’t make things different for him, but if Pierre was considering leaving then I might want to talk to him about my own options.