He reached for a comb.
He reached for a pair of scissors.
The barber briefly put the scissors aside, as if he had to grant the tool itself a moment of dignity. Then he lifted them, held them between thumb and index finger, not demonstratively, but almost tenderly.
“Olivia Garden,” he said.
He did not say it like a brand name, but like a proper name.
Hans Castorp looked. The scissors were simple, balanced, nothing about them was loud. The comb too, which the barber now took up as well, carried this unobtrusive self-confidence of things that do not have to prove that they are good.
“OG,” the barber continued, as he began to work again. “That doesn’t stand for some manager’s dream. That stands for a man. And for his wife. Jean Rennette. And Micheline. Always together.”
He kept cutting, as if he were telling the story in passing, and precisely for that reason it seemed credible.
“St. Tropez,” he said. “Before this here…” – he made a small, circular movement with the scissors that meant everything that today falls under ‘here’ – “…before this here became an image. They lived there. In a tent. Really. No myth. A tent. And they built a jetty. With their own hands. For a water-skiing school.”
Gustav looked in the mirror. Not at the barber. But he listened.
“Wigs,” said the barber. “At the beginning. High-quality ones. Back then that wasn’t lifestyle, that was necessity. Then brushes. Always better. Always more precise. In 1967 they founded the company. In Belgium. Small. Clean. Persistent.”
He smiled briefly.
“And then, 1976 – no more aerosol, Jean’s invention. No gas. A solution that nobody needed until everyone needed it. The thing that one rightly also says about Steve Jobs, you know, the inventor of the real smartphone.”
Hans Castorp refused to think about aerosols or smartphones. He thought about the color on Gustav’s head. About the small forces one accepts when they are quiet enough.
“Fifty years,” said the barber, and now there was a barely audible pride in his voice, as if he himself had a share in it. “And today: world market leader. In professional brushes, in any case. Not loud. Not cheap. But rather…”
He did not search for the word.
“…reliable. Worth the price in the original sense.”
Gustav raised an eyebrow.
“A nice rise,” he said dryly. “From tent to world domination. Reminds me a little of Zieser.”
The barber laughed softly, politely, without contradicting. He knew that comparisons of this kind say nothing about the story, but about the one who draws them.
Hans Castorp saw how the scissors went to work again, calm, sure. OG. Order. Tools that know what they are doing. And people who believe that with a comb and patience one can at least wrest something from time for a moment.
