The sun had just set behind the bungalows of Alley C.

He closed the notebook and looked at the photograph of the summer of ’61 hung above the bar. It was time to finish it. To silence the past once and for all; to put all trace of it on the bonfire, burn it and scatter its ashes.

As if it had never existed.

2 Dialogue from the film, The Big Blue, directed by Luc Besson, © 1988, Gaumont.

32

19 August 2016, 8 p.m.

‘Your beer, Herr Schreiber.’

Marco, the young waiter at the bar in the Euproctes, had checked that the bottle was cold before serving Jakob his Bitburger. The boss ordered eight packs every summer, for the sole use of the oldest customer on the campsite, a kind of imperial privilege dating back to the days of Bismarck.

‘Danke.’

The German hadn’t even looked up from his computer. Schreiber was exactly the kind of customer Marco couldn’t stand. The customer who thinks he’s interesting. Who smiles at you with a slight look of contempt, who explains all the whys and wherefores of every single thing, going on about how things were better before, the waiters in the old days, the espressos in the old days, the motorbikes in the old days, the Mediterranean in the old days … There was only one thing he couldn’t reproach Jakob Schreiber for: at over seventy, he still had the energy and curiosity of a young man, demonstrating for you the superiority of carbon pétanque balls over stainless steel, the superiority of analogue over digital photography, of craft beer over industrially produced.

His days at the campsite were organised as rigorously as a Mannschaft 4-4-2. A game of pétanque in the morning, between ten and twenty photographs in the afternoon, and thirty-three centilitres of beer in the evening. An unchanging way of life.

And to think that he still had a good twenty years to bore them senseless …

He wouldn’t be the kind to join in with the poker game in the next room.

But in front of his computer, that evening, Jakob was getting bored. At his age, the unexpected was not recommended. 67 per cent of files copied, said the grey bar that was slowly turning green. Files flashed across his computer screen at great speed, the way they do on those new police dramas where as many different images slide past during the opening titles as there are in a whole episode of Derrick. The download still wasn’t going fast enough for Jakob’s liking. He had calculated that he would have to download about eight hundred photographs from the cloud, all the pictures from the summer of ’89, stored at 300 dpi. His old laptop was struggling, either that or the wi-fi connection in the Euproctes bar left something to be desired.