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

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 so 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 biddies 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.