I feel like screaming, like ripping my skin off. I don’t know, I don’t know what to do, I feel crushed by the silence, this terrifying silence, it is impossible for me to tell things apart. Dream, nightmare and reality have merged. There is no way out.
I woke up sweating. It was — I don’t know, it might be night, it might be day. I called out for Ophélie. I shouted again, “Ophélie, Ophélie!” I heard a noise in the kitchen, a dull drone. . the hiss of gas expanding. . the fridge. “Ophélie. . Ophélie!” She isn’t there. She hasn’t come home. She has left me. The silence is preternatural. . I can hear it, it smells of burning, it clings to your skin. Something falls off the sofa. My God, the noise! A book. . Mein Kampf. I take it into the garage and burn it.
RACHEL’S DIARY, APRIL 1995
I found Jean 92. It was easy. I simply turned up at the return address he wrote on the letters he sent to papa. He lives in a tumbledown shack at the end of a dark alley in a dismal part of a village somewhere near Strasbourg that has shrivelled away as families have died out. Driving from the urban masterpiece that is Strasbourg to this hamlet which appears on no maps and whose name, out of humanity, I won’t mention, I felt as though I might reach the end of the world and bitterly regret it. In France there are still godforsaken places so out of the way you wonder where you are. My Renault 4 didn’t know the place, though I rented it in Strasbourg and it must have roamed this hinterland often enough. Coming in to the village, a surly farmer jerked his thumb towards the arse-end of the street when I stopped and asked, “Could you tell me where I might find Ernest Brucke?” There seemed no point thanking him, he’d lost the power of speech, he would have been incapable of saying, “You’re welcome, monsieur.”
After scaring three miserable old witches leaning on their brooms, and setting a pack of stray dogs yapping, I finally found the place. It was the last house in the village. Beyond, there was nothing but a wall of wild vegetation.
I had been expecting to be met by an old man and was worrying whether he would still have wits enough to understand my questions; what I found was a man of indeterminate age wearing a curious getup, his belly swollen and distended, his face as mottled and pockmarked as that of only the most dedicated alcoholic. His fly was gaping open but he clearly didn’t care. He was sitting outside in a tiny garden full of flaking, peeling junk — a handkerchief-sized wasteland. He sat at a rickety metal table on which stood a bottle of schnapps; there was a chipped glass whose existence was nominal, fused as it was to the table, half-filled with an oily liquid on which floated leaves, pine needles and dead flies; and there was an improbable ashtray buried under a mound of ashes, cigarette butts and cremated insects. The man stared straight in front of him, saying nothing. He did not even see me arrive.
I felt a surge of pity. Here was a human wreck on the brink of extinction. An image flashed into my mind and I was convinced that this was what would happen: the man would die here, covered in lichen, glued to his chair, the bottle within easy reach, thinking nothing, saying nothing, seeing nothing of what was around him. I found it difficult to imagine papa — a picture of austerity, a very German austerity — being friends with such a man. But a lot of time had passed, I thought, and maybe this man had had his day in the sun. However, a little mental arithmetic persuaded me that he and papa did not know — could not have known — each other. It was a matter of age and circumstance. Papa hadn’t set foot outside Algeria since 1962, at which point this man would have been playing cowboys and Indians with the dirty little village pigs or playing hide-and-seek in the bushes with the sheep before he and his Kameraden discovered alcohol. Now, the man was about fifty years old — clearly fifty years too many — but a far cry from seventy-six, the age my father had been when he died. I didn’t even consider the possibility that he had been to Algeria and had met my father there. They don’t stand for any bullshit in Algeria, they have a border, they have fearsome guards and draconian laws, no one is allowed to visit and there is no question of making exceptions. There are places like that, places where you are not allowed to enter, to leave, or to know why. Perhaps alcohol had preserved him, or prematurely aged him, or maybe it had given him the means to become a different person. There was obviously something I didn’t understand.