Perfectly Ordinary People(43)

Not using themselves? What does that mean?

I didn’t understand what he meant either until he managed to say it – until he managed to tell me that they’d raped him with a bit of wood. I don’t know the details – we truly never did speak of it again. But I believe they’d smashed a chair over someone, and then raped him with the chair leg.

He said they’d broken his insides. I remember he said that. That he was ‘broken’. And he said that was why he kept bleeding.

My God, that’s horrific. I can understand your reticence, to have it in the interview. My feeling is that it’s important. People need to know this stuff. To remember. But we can discuss what to keep in and what to leave out at the end. And was Pierre able to walk? Were you able to leave?

Yes. Actually, we had to leave the very next morning.

Why? What happened?

We’d decided to ask Matias if it would be OK to wait a few days – if he thought we’d be safe for that long – because we wanted Pierre to be able to recover a bit first. Pierre was also desperately hoping for news about Johann before he left. We suspected that he’d been shipped to Schirmeck, but it was only hearsay, and Matias had said he’d try to find out for sure. Pierre was still desperately hoping that Johann would be able to run away with us.

As I was leaving Pierre’s apartment, I crossed paths with a boy in shorts, sprinting up the stairs, and just as I reached the downstairs street door, Pierre called me back. So I turned around and trudged back up, crossing paths again with the kid, now heading down. I remember thinking it strange that he avoided eye contact.

When I got back to Pierre’s landing I found him leaning against the wall reading a note, and he handed it to me. It was very short, it said something like, ‘Go now. Go today. Go as soon as possible.’ Oh, and, ‘If you stay I won’t be able to help you’. And it said not to wait for Johann. That he was ‘gone’.

I asked Pierre if he was sure it was Matias’s handwriting, and he said that yes, it definitely was. And then he started to cry about Johann, saying, ‘Gone? What does he mean, gone?’

I hugged him and told him that whatever it meant, we couldn’t help him, and that he needed to save himself right now, that it was what Johann would want. We needed to think about ourselves, I said. I told him we’d have to leave and that my father was offering to drive us. I said he should tell his mother what was going on, but Pierre didn’t want to tell her anything. He was scared she’d make too much fuss, I think. To say that she wasn’t particularly good in a crisis would be an understatement.

I went next door to tell Dad, and by the time I got there Mum had packed a tiny suitcase with clothes and food before going off, as usual, to her cleaning job.

Once I’d told him about Matias’s note, Dad decided that Pierre, myself and the baby should go and sleep in his garage. He said that it was dangerous to stay at home and the police might return at any moment. I protested that I hadn’t been able to say goodbye, but Dad insisted it was better this way, and more discreet if Mum carried on as usual.

He went off to the garage with my suitcase wrapped up in a blanket to disguise it, telling me to get Pierre and meet him there as soon as we could. He said it was too dangerous for us to all walk together.

And was Pierre able to walk by then? Was it far?

It was about a kilometre, I suppose, and yes, he could walk, just about. The bleeding appeared to have stopped, though what he hadn’t told me was that he’d stuffed towels down his underwear. It wasn’t until we reached La Vieille-Loye the next day that I realised how bad it still was. His feet were in a terrible state too. God knows how he’d managed to keep shoes on over those toes. He must have been in a lot of pain.

Anyway, he packed his tool-bag with clothes and threw it out of his bedroom window into the garden. He told his mother he was coming next door to see me and they argued about that because she quite rightly didn’t think he was well enough to go visiting anyone, but in the end she let him go. The last words she said to him were that he was the stubbornest child she’d ever known.

So he didn’t say goodbye to her either?

No. He left her a note, I think. As I recall, he put it in his bed.

He’d dressed in his plumber’s overalls and I remember making some joke about that, but it turned out to be a good choice. They were very resistant – they lasted him for ever, those overalls – plus they were what people were used to seeing him in during the day, so in a way it disguised him for the walk to the garage.

We both slept really badly, me and the baby on the seats of the pickup and Pierre in Dad’s dirty old garage armchair, and the next morning we waited for him to arrive. He’d said that if he wasn’t there by lunchtime then it meant the Germans had come, and we should just do our best to get out of Mulhouse, so that wait was really nerve-wracking. I kept pacing around the garage, chewing my nails until my fingers bled. But he arrived about ten in the morning, carrying two jerry cans of petrol to add to what he had in the pickup. I don’t know where he got those from . . . Petrol was really hard to come by. He must have called in a few favours, I suppose.

The pickup had a single three-person bench seat up front and an open flatbed bit behind the cabin, so Dad decided to hide Pierre horizontally in the tiny space behind the seat and have me and the baby sit up front. Pierre looked suspicious, he said, while I looked like the Virgin Mary. We rolled him in a blanket and slid him into the space.