Colour of Dawn by Yanick Lahens Page A

metal box and taken out the yellowing, ageing photo that has fixed her at twenty-five, I still have not found the key to this mystery… Right now I suspect Maître Fortuné is ready to lay his cheek against her breasts and to kiss the hem of her dress.
    Madame Thomas, the first customer, arrives around eleven o’clock, an hour after the shop opened. I hate Madame Thomas. A woman with an extravagant hairdo dyed in tawny shades, with outrageous make-up, having applied every artifice. Madame Thomas belongs to the nouveau riche set who give the city a flashy gaiety in total contrast to the hordes of destitutes who are still in the process of encircling it.
    â€˜Joyeuse, bring me Madame Herbruch’s new stock to look at.’
    â€˜Of course,’ I reply with a smile that doubtless does little to conceal my irritation.
    Madame Thomas inspects the whole of the dress section, the accessories and the shelf of shoes. As usual she turns the shop upside down. I read in her eyes what her lips do not say: ‘You can sulk and curse silently all you like, my girl; I don’t care. I could buy the shop and you with it.’
    But Madame Thomas is mistaken. She can’t buy everything. This fine edifice of Madame Herbruch’s conceals some major faults. Madame Thomas herself is worried. If I’ve understood correctly, her young gigolo by the name of James, fifteen years her junior, decided to drop her a week ago. The advice of Madame Herbruch no longer makes any difference. I assume that young James prefers to satisfy himself, alone and whenever the fancy takes him, beneath the eyes of God, rather than awake a dead soul. Fignolé always made clear his aversion for her starchy type, and for that other type, imbued with arrogance, the privileged of any age. Fignolé told me on one of his talkative days that something was there turning the world against us and all those like us. That life was an absurd lottery where those who won have everything and those who lost, nothing. Absolutely nothing. Madame Thomas, for the moment, is visibly savouring her gains.
    â€˜You’re right, Fignolé, the world is divided between the dogs and those who hit them on their muzzles. Joyeuse does not want to hit anyone, Fignolé, but has sworn not to be on the side of the dogs.’
    I grit my teeth, hold my tongue firmly and think of my pay at the end of the month. A salary that doesn’t bring in much. A salary without fanfare but that I can’t turn my nose up at. And I dream of the day when I, too, can go to a luxury shop and, forgetting everything, have the shelves emptied for me one by one by an ill-tempered assistant. Actually, I don’t dream. I hone my weapons. I sharpen my fangs. I have this force in me which knows how to confront the pain, reduce sorrow to silence. I care nothing for changing the world. I want to howl with the wolves.

NINETEEN
    T he skin of the wounded young man has taken on that greyish hue that is so familiar to me, and that foretells no good. The blood is not irrigating the arteries and the veins very well. And his moans are getting louder and louder. As he moans, a kind of foam comes from his mouth. The auxiliary fails to notice and I wipe the corners of his mouth with a little square of cloth given to me by his mother. The moment when I lift his head and move the cloth towards his lips, he loses control and shouts right out. I call the duty doctor as a matter of urgency.
    The injured boy’s mother is shaken by convulsions. It takes two assistant nurses to get her under control and lead her out for a moment. The moans of the youth then become louder than before. They no longer come from his throat, but are scraped out from deep in his belly, shorn of that last modesty to which he has been clinging. He cries without holding back at all. The sobs and moans of a young man of eighteen are more terrible than the Apocalypse. But the Apocalypse has already happened so many times on