The Collaborators. Reginald Hill
Christian said, ‘I think so, I’m trying…’
The old soldier regarded him keenly and said, ‘You’ve had no service, have you, sir? You can’t understand without knowing it for yourself.’
Valois flushed and said, ‘Go on.’
‘It hit Simonian bad. His best mate, a young lad from Auxerre, died in his arms, spilling his guts all over him. I think he’d have gone over the top himself then, trying to take the bastards on single-handed, but the lieutenant stopped him. He was a good lad, that lieutenant. Fucking children they’re putting in charge now, I said when I first saw him. But he was all right.
‘Finally the lieutenant decided to call it a day. Our wireless had packed up, see, and for a long time we thought it was like the first war again, with us part of a long line running all the way from the sea to Switzerland. Little Verdun, that’s what I called the place we was. Except we found when we got the wireless going again, that just about every other bugger had packed up and gone home, or they were sitting on their arses waiting to be rounded up and trucked off east. Well, now the case was altered. Simonian was keen to go on fighting at first, but the lieutenant persuaded him for the sake of his mates to give it up. So we made a white flag, but before we shoved it up, the lieutenant said, “Hold on. Simonian, take this,” and he handed over the dead lad from Auxerre’s pass-book. “What for?” asks Simonian. “So you can chuck your own away,” says the lieutenant. “I was in Berlin before the war and I assure you that you’ll be better off not to have the name Iakov Moseich Simonian in your pass-book when the Boche get round to checking their prisoners.” “No,” says Simonian. “I’m not using these papers, I’m not having his parents told he’s alive and well and a prisoner when he’s lying dead and unburied out here.” “Please yourself,” says the lieutenant. “But let’s have a look at your own book then.” And he takes it and he scratches and tears it, then hands it back, looking right scruffy but no worse than many another after what we’d been through. “There,” he says. “You’ve been christened in every sense!” And I glanced at the book and saw that all that remained of his name was Jean-Paul Simon!
‘Now we waved the flag. The only trouble was that Fritz seemed to be a bit short-sighted. Or more like a bit short-tempered for all the bother we’d caused. So they just shot the flag to pieces and us with it. There were only four of us left alive and of these, only me and Simonian lasted long enough to get to hospital, me with one foot shot off and him with a bullet in his head.
‘And that was it, more or less. They were sawing bits off me for the next few months till they’d got as far as they could go. I didn’t even know Jean-Paul was still alive till a month or so back when I was getting around on my crutch and ran into him, so to speak, in a wheelchair. He didn’t seem to recognize me at first but when we got to talking, I could see it all gradually coming back to him. The thing was, he was still down in the books as Jean-Paul Simon. I asked one of the nurses about him. She said it was sad, he never said anything about his past life and there didn’t seem to be any next of kin to inform. At least he was getting better, though he’d been very ill. Well, I guessed that he was just playing dumb because, having changed his name, he could hardly start talking about a family called Simonian, could he? And from what I heard people saying, the lieutenant had been right. Iakov Moseich was not a good label to wear in the heart of Bocheland, which is where he’ll likely end up.
‘Me, well, there was no use sending a one-legged man to a POW camp, even the Boche could see that. So they decided to discharge me back home. When I told Jean-Paul, he asked me to get in touch with you, Monsieur Valois, and tell you he was alive and well. He didn’t want to risk putting anything down on paper in case I got searched. So here I am and that’s my message!’
‘By the time he finished it was nearly curfew or I’d have come round last night,’ concluded Valois. ‘He slept in the flat and this morning I sent him off with some money.’
‘Did you get his address? Can I talk to him?’ demanded Janine.
‘Of course,’ said Valois. ‘Though not straightaway, eh? I’ll fix it up later. There’s still a slight risk now, and it’s best not to take chances.’
This wasn’t the real reason, but Janine in her joy and excitement was easily persuaded to accept it. The truth was that Valois had other cause to feel uneasy about a meeting between Pivert and Janine. He’d censored all references to the mental scarring left by Jean-Paul’s wound.
‘I knew he was married with kiddies,’ Pivert had said. ‘You talk about these things when you’re under fire like we’d been. But first time I mentioned them in the hospital, he just looked blank. Another time he talked about them, but like he was talking about something in a dream. Most of the time he just wanted to talk about our old comrades. I had to go through how each of them died, he was so desperate to believe that some others might have survived.
‘But you he seemed to remember all the time, sir. You and his old mother. He said to contact you first so you could break it to the old lady. Good news can sometimes shock even more than bad, can’t it?’
Good news so mixed with cause for unease certainly could, decided Valois. And he had taken it upon himself to convey only the joyous essentials of the tale to Janine and his reward was to see her face light up like a spring dawn.
When Sophie returned from shopping, complaining bitterly about the lack of most things and the price of the rest, Valois diplomatically withdrew. They needn’t have worried, however. She short-circuited Janine’s tentative approach to the subject with a crisp, ‘What’s this? You’ve got news of Jean-Paul, haven’t you? Well, praise be to God, he’s alive!’
‘Bubbah! How did you know?’ demanded Janine amazed.
‘Know? I’ve always known! And how did I know you were going to tell me? Well, I’ve not seen your eyes sparkle like that for over a year, so I didn’t think you were going to tell me he was dead! Come here, child!’
Laughing and crying together, Janine fell into the old woman’s arms.
After joy came decision. Day to day existence had gone out of the window. There was now a future to be planned.
Janine wanted to sit down and write a long loving letter to Jean-Paul straightaway and once more found herself at odds with Christian.
‘You can’t just write,’ he said. ‘Letters are censored. I don’t know how much danger Jean-Paul would be in if they discovered his background, but they’d certainly sit up and take notice if they did find out he’d been misleading them about his name. So it can’t help him if suddenly out of the blue he starts getting letters from his family, can it?’
To Janine’s surprise and disappointment, Sophie supported Valois. ‘There are stories told in the schul of what these Nazis have done in Germany. If my son is soon to go into one of these prisoner camps, better he go as Jean-Paul Simon, Catholic, I think.’
‘But we have to let him know that we’re all well, Bubbah, you, me and the children!’ cried Janine. ‘And if we don’t contact him straightaway, how will we ever know where they send him? Oh, don’t let’s lose him again so soon after finding him! Couldn’t I travel to Nancy to see him? Christian, couldn’t your father help me to get an Ausweis?’
Valois shook his head in exasperation.
‘Please, I beg of you, Janine. Do nothing without consulting me first, eh? Look at it this way. The Germans have got themselves a prisoner, an ordinary soldier of no particular importance, called Jean-Paul Simon. The only danger is from us, his friends, if we draw the Germans’ attention to him in any way.’
Suddenly all Janine’s other emotions were blanked out by a single memory. Up to now she’d completely forgotten her interview with the Abwehr lieutenant. Now Valois’s warning brought it all back. Just how much had her mother told Mai about Jean-Paul?
She shook her head. What did it matter? The Abwehr were hardly going to concern themselves with one