The A26 Read Free Page A

first class. Bernard would never go to Arcachon. To tell the truth, he didn’t give two hoots aboutArcachon, there were so many places in the world where one would never set foot. What was there over there, anyway? A dune, a big Dune of Pilat which looked just like the desert, they said. It was people who’d never been there who said that. Everything looked like everything else, people couldn’t help comparing the things they knew to the things they didn’t know, so they could say they did know, that they’d been round the world without leaving their own fireside. Six of one and half a dozen of the other, no cause for regrets. No gifts for sick employees, they’d prefer them just to clear off, preferably without a trace. Illness really annoyed them, it was bad for business, and they took a dim view of it. It lowered the troops’ morale.
    ‘Oh my poor Bonnet, and with your poor sister too! How much time off do you want?’
    Taking his cap between thumb and forefinger, Bernard sent it flying somewhere over the containers, like a Frisbee. He had another one in the locker room. No harm done. The wind caressed his baldness. In the early days, when Yolande’s hair had begun to grow back he’d loved running his hand over her head. All the little hairs standing upright had given him a feeling like electricity in his palm. Her hair had grown back pure white. Yet she was only twenty. The shock of it, no doubt. Before that it was blonde, red blonde, Titian she used to call it.
    ‘WITH SEVEN CENTIMETRES OF HAIR’
    ‘I have already told you how hard-working the Germans are. They make clothes and chocolateout of wood, and make lots of things from all sorts of materials which have not been used until now. They have now discovered it is possible to make felt hats out of the hair cut off by the hairdresser. It is likewise possible to make rugs from these hair clippings. Since hair has to be a certain length for this, however, people are forbidden to cut hair before it has reached this length. If the hairdressers are diligent and collect up the hair carefully, in one year almost 300,000 kilos of hair will be obtained. That sounds like a lot of hats and quite a few rugs.’
    There it was in black and white, in the bound volume of
La Semaine de Suzette
, under the heading ‘Suzette across the world’, an old collection from 1932, worn shiny, stained and yellowing, like everything from that era. Despite knowing it by heart, Yolande loved to spend hours leafing through it. She had done all the crosswords, every rebus and sewn the entire wardrobe for Bleuette (a 29-centimetre doll, real curled hair, eyes that shut, and unbreakable posable head). She loved the smell it gave off when the pages were opened, a musty smell of old biscuits. The Germans would be back. She wasn’t especially waiting for them but she knew they’d be back.
    It was the drop of water falling on her newly shaven head which had hurt her the most, a deafening sound like the stroke of a gong which had stayed in her head ever since. As for everything else, she had let them get on with it, like a sheep, there was nothing else to be done with idiots. For as long as they kept her in the café, amidst their yelling, she had been outside her body. She was a pastmaster at switching off, what with her lunatic of a father who would bawl her out for the slightest thing. She’d had enough time to practise. But on leaving the Café de la Gare, after they’d let her go, a large drop,
plop!
filled with all the absurdities of the past four years. You’d have thought that ever since they’d dragged her out of her house, the sky had been holding itself back so as to descend on her with all its might in that drop.
    Yolande didn’t even remember the Boche’s name. To tell the truth, it wasn’t so much for what she’d done with him that they’d shaved her head, more for what she’d refused to do with some of her ‘barbers’.
    What did it matter anyway? She had never liked