The foolish young sun drying its rays above the pale-green shoots carpeting the fields seemed to agree with her. The less you thought, the more you lived, and whatever you could take was one fewer thing for the Boches to get. The Boches or someone else, stupidity didn’t stop at borders. She was at this point in her reflections when Bernard had started yelling: ‘Yoyo! Help, Yoyo, I’m drowning!’ The sack with Titi in it was lying by the edge of the water near a long wooden rod, and in the middle of the pond her brother was flailing about as he went under. Yolande had leapt into the thick black liquid. It wasn’t very deep, maybe two metres in the centre, but the little idiot had got his foot caught in some scrap metal and couldn’t get it free again. She had had trouble extricating him, he was panicking and yelling at the top of his voice. Finally she’d succeeded in pulling him to the bank by his hair. They had flopped down, panting, beside the sack swollen with water, stones and Titi, now defunct. They stank of mud. Black bubbles were still bursting on the surface of the crater, letting off smells of infernal farts.
‘Are you mad or something? It’s full of God knows what in there. Why d’you do that?’
‘I just slipped, Yoyo. I didn’t want Titi to die. I thought a good ducking would be enough.’
‘Well, he’s dead anyway, and you could have ended up the same way, you little shit. Let’s see your ankle.’
It was all swollen, bloody like raw steak. Yolande had torn a strip from her dress to use as a bandage.
‘Yoyo?’
‘What?’
‘You stink.’
‘So do you.’
They’d rolled around on the grass, laughing like things possessed. Coated in mud all over, they’d slithered into each other’s arms like eels. Yolande had poked her tongue into his mouth to make him be quiet. Her brother’s body had juddered between her thighs and then for one brief moment everything was still. War itself could not have divided them. The silence had something of eternity about it. Then a frog jumped into the water. Yolande sat up again, the blue of her eyes had darkened to violet. Bernard was smiling, eyes closed like a child asleep, lips slightly parted. Yolande had remembered a poem she’d read at school, about a young soldier lying dead in a verdant spot bathed in sunlight. It had ended with ‘Nature, cradle him gently, he is cold’ or some such.
‘You’ll never do that.’
‘What?’
‘Fight their stupid war. You’ll be like me, you’ll live for ever.’
With one kick, she’d consigned Titi to his ineluctable fate once more and they’d gone home. For that one day, Yolande had been treated like a queen, she had saved her little brother’s life. No one had picked quarrels with her. The best thing of all had been hearing fat Fernande calling for her cat.
Now Bernard had spoilt everything. His illness had made him selfish, he had no time for her any more. At a corner of the table, Yolande was mixing vermicelli and caster sugar.
Even seen full on, Bernard was now only a profile, with a lipless black hole in place of a mouth. What life he had left was lurking there, in that well of shadows, evident only in shallow gusts of foul-smelling breath. He no longer knew whether he was awake or asleep, there was no difference, just the same state on repeat for almost a week now. Fragments of the newspaper article would come back to him: ‘Grisly discovery, police, woman’s body …’ Each word was so charged with meaning that a whole sentence would throw him into complete and utter confusion. He wasn’t afraid for himself, the A26 was swarming with foreign workers – Spaniards, Turks, North Africans – almost 250 firms were at work on the section, 700 workers, that was where the finger of suspicion pointed. And in any case, what could they do to him? Life had already condemned him for a crime he had not committed, being born without intent. There were a lot of words ending in ‘ion’ in the article: ‘investigations, identification, conclusions, etc’. After that he amused himself by making a string of other words ending in ‘ion’: circulation, ascension, passion, circumvolution. That one was a beauty, a graceful swirl. Recitation: ‘La cigale ayant chanté tout l’été se trouva fort dépourvue quand la bise fut venue.’ Mademoiselle Leny, his primary school teacher, used to pronounce it ‘la Biiiise!’ Her eyebrows would shoot right up to the top of her forehead when she said ‘la Biiise!’
Yolande had been the one to teach him how to kiss, and to masturbate, but that was later. They’d almost gone the whole way once. One Thursday afternoon, when he’d had flu. It was winter, in the last year of the war. She was cold and had lain down next to him in the bed. People were cold the whole time, coal was hard to find. He was worried that she would catch his germs, but she’d said she didn’t care, she was stronger than they were. They’d been looking at a film magazine. She was deliberately lingering over the pages showing scantily dressed film stars: ‘What about her, doesn’t that make you feel anything when you look at her? Her legs, there In a flash, one fever had been replaced by another. There were no flies on his pyjamas, the cord at his waist was cutting into him. It was Yolande who had undone it. Slowly, Bernard’s hand had made its way up under his sister’s skirt. He’d stopped at the first hairs, at the top of her thighs, not daring to venture further, into the unknown jungle. The elastic material of her knickers was stretched tight, a yielding shell which fitted neatly into the palm of his hand. He had lain on top of her, burning up, drenched in sweat. Yolande had opened her legs and pulled her pants out of the way, while her other hand guided Bernard into position. But at the moment of penetration, she had pushed him sharply away.
As for the rest, he no longer remembered. He must have masturbated, in all probability.
‘I’m dying, and I’ve got a hard-on.’
Nothing else had ever happened between him and his sister.
‘I find him more disgusting every day. He’s drunk by ten in the morning, and every evening I get a pasting because some customer has been giving me the eye, or for any old thing. Shall I tell you what? I wish he’d die.’
‘That’ll happen.’
‘Yes, but when?’
Jacqueline was making huge figures of eight with her cloth on the waxed tablecloth. There wasn’t so much as a crumb of Bernard’s lunch left, but she carried on, as if she were trying to rub off the brown and yellow floral pattern on the tablecloth or something even more stubborn, Roland’s life for instance. She had her sleeves rolled up to the elbow. Bernard had always loved her arms, strong, hands reddened from washing up. It must be good to sleep in arms like those.
‘You’re not listening to me – where are you?’
‘Yes, I am, I’m here.’
‘No, you’re here but you’re not here. You look like a saint in a church, smiling at everything but not seeing a thing.’
‘I don’t know. It’s as if I’ve been away somewhere. I recognise things and people, but it’s all changed ever so slightly, like the tracing on top of a drawing that’s moved by a fraction of a millimetre. I don’t know how to explain it to you.’
‘I’ve not heard from you for a whole week. Were you having a rough time?’
‘That’s putting it mildly. But yes, I really thought I’d had it. Death comes closer, like the sea, it hits me full in the face, a huge wave of black foam. I tell myself the time has come, in my head I’ve packed my bag, and then it draws away again. It’ll be back.’
‘Aren’t you scared?’
‘Not any more. When I was a kid on holiday at the beach, I used to practise walking with my eyes closed, in case I went blind some day. It’s the same sort of thing.’
‘You’re going and then you come back – is that what you’re saying?’
‘If you like.’
‘If it was me, I wouldn’t come back.’
‘You