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“I resent phrases like ‘sneak off’ and ‘keep your hands off her.’ They do not describe what happened yesterday accurately, and they are repulsive insinuations.”
He waved my objections aside impatiently. “At all events, you know what I mean. If you agree to these conditions, then Katya will have your company—which, for reasons that escape understanding, she seems to take pleasure in—and you will have seven whole days of her charm and gentleness. I realize of course that you have dreamt of a lifetime of Katya, and I can’t really blame you. The lowly moth dreams of possessing the moon. But seven days is better than nothing. And, believe me,” he enunciated each word clearly, “nothing is your only alternative.” He sat back and pressed his thumb and forefinger into his eye sockets to relieve his fatigue.
“Are you finished?” I asked.
“Not quite.” He spoke without opening his eyes. “You must also undertake to assist me in keeping Father in his accustomed state of ignorance as to events around him.”
“Are you through now?”
“Probably not. But you have been good enough to hear me out with few interruptions. I suppose I must offer you the same consideration.”
“First, it is unjust of you to imply that I pried into your affairs to learn that you were making arrangements to leave Etcheverria. You must know that everything immediately becomes public knowledge in a provincial village. I learned of it quite by accident from my colleague, Dr. Gros.”
“Very well. How you found out is of little importance. My real objection is to your blurting it out to Katya with no concern about the shock it must have been to her.”
“I had no way to know that you were withholding your plans from her. I naturally assumed that something affecting her life so intensely would not be done behind her back.”
“Pain delayed is pain lessened.”
“Then you admit that she does not want to go? That leaving here will be painful for her?”
“I have never denied that. But the pain of leaving is nothing to the danger of staying.”
“So you tell me. But you refuse to explain what this great danger is.”
“You have no right to an explanation.”
“I believe that my feelings for Katya give me that right.”
“You are quite mistaken in that belief.”
“That’s your view.”
“My view is the only one that matters.”
“That, too, is merely your view.”
“Would I be correct in assuming that we have reached an impasse?”
I hated the lazy, nasal tone of his voice and the half-closed eyes settled on me as though I were an inanimate thing. But after a short pause I continued, “You obviously sought to hurt me by mentioning other men who have loved Katya. And I’ll confess that you succeeded to a degree. I had indeed thought she was somewhat younger than I, rather than somewhat older, and if the question of other loves before me had entered my mind—and it did not—I suppose I would have assumed that I was her first love, as she is mine.”
He looked at me with distant curiosity. “You really assume that Katya loves you? Have you any evidence for that?—beyond, of course, the heart having reasons the mind knows not of, and all that trash?”
I chose not to respond because, in fact, I had no evidence at all that she was more than fond of me. Describing more what I wished I felt than what I did, I said, “A man who loves a woman should feel a certain… gratitude, I suppose… towards anyone who has also loved and brought pleasure to her. You and I, in different ways, both love her. We ought not to be at odds with each other. I accept the fact that you think you’re doing what’s best for her. I think you’re terribly wrong, but I don’t doubt your motives. Whatever it is that you’re running away from, I am sure it’s wrong of you to deny Katya a chance to make a life for herself. But I don’t doubt your love for her.”
His customary expression of weary hauteur relaxed, and there was a trace of compassion in his voice when he said, “Perhaps I was cruelly vague when I spoke of the ‘men’ who had loved her. There was only one. In Paris. And I never meant to imply that she loved him in return. She was kind to him. She doubtless took pleasure in his company. But love? I rather doubt it.”
I tried to conceal the relief and comfort I found in this suggestion that I was her first love. “And what happened to this young man in Paris?”
Paul settled his metallic eyes on me for a moment. Then he rose from his chair. “All this is a bit oblique to the point. The question is: Do you intend to accept the conditions I have made? Or would you rather not see Katya again.”
“Before I answer, let me… Paul, obviously there is something here, some terrible thing, that you think you must flee from. Perhaps I could help in some way, if you would share the problem with me.”
“That is out of the question. There’s nothing you could possibly do—save perhaps make things worse.”
“Let me try!”
“There’s nothing you could do, I tell you! And I cannot discuss this further with you. Now… what about my conditions?”
“What choice have I, other than to accept them?”
“You could choose not to see Katya again. But I don’t expect you to make that nobler choice.”
“As indeed I shall not. Very well. I accept your conditions.” I rose. “Now I shall join Katya at the bottom of the garden, if that does not fall within your definition of ‘sneaking off.’ “
He waved me away listlessly. “Just so you remember your promise to keep your hands off her.”
I remembered the promise; but I had no intention of keeping it. I was convinced that I must do whatever I could to save Katya from a shattered life wasted in running from place to place each time Paul was frightened by shadowy dreads.
“You know, Montjean…” Paul’s bored drawl stopped me just as I reached the terrace door. I turned to find him slouched down in his chair, his free hand over his face and his eyes closed. “It’s true that we could never have been friends, even under the best of conditions—breeding, social worlds, tastes, all that business. But you’d be mistaken to think I dislike you. A moment ago, you said something rather good about having a certain affection for those who have loved Katya. I am not immune to such feelings myself. No, I don’t dislike you, Montjean. In fact, I find you rather…” He was silent for a moment. “Oh, never mind.” He shrugged away the rest of his explanation and reverted to his former tone. “I daresay you intend to impose your company upon us at supper?”
“How could I decline so gracious an invitation?”
He smiled wanly. “Ah, now that’s more like it.”
Supper consisted of the same hardy rural menu as before, a thick potage, salad, local bread, local cheese, local wine, but the atmosphere was quite festive, as Monsieur Treville was in good spirits.
“There you see, Paul?” Monsieur Treville said with the teasing tone he had affected throughout the meal. “Jean-Marc attacks his cheese with honest vigor. Not like you, who finds it insufficiently delicate for your refined tastes.” Partway through supper, after having addressed me alternately as Doctor Montjean and Doctor Jean Marque (and once, out of nowhere, as Doctor Jean Mont), he surrendered to his confusion and began using my given name. He seemed to be experiencing a surge of affection for his son and was expressing it, as I have seen other fathers do, in the emotionally safe way of banter, using my presence as an opportunity to trot forth each of his son’s qualities, which he compared to mine in a tone that seemed to criticize Paul, but which never failed to accent his good points. He noted that I had worked hard at my studies, making the best of my limited opportunities and gifts (some fluster and apology as he assured me that he meant to say that my opportunities were limited, not my gifts), while Paul, miserable person that he was, had idled away his time and wasted his native brilliance, wit, and uncommon celerity of intellect. I had used such leisure as I had to delve into the Black Death that had so altered the course of history as to shock Europe out of the Dark Ages, while Paul had applied himself to the futile activities of becoming the best shot in Paris, a leader of the most promising young society, a champion amateur kick-boxer, and a much-sought-after decoration to any social event. And on it went; my having done all the dull correct things, and poor Paul having squandered his endless gifts (each one detailed). But by no means were we to understand that Paul’s life was a desert of wasted opportunities. No, the clear implication was that, any day now, he would grasp the rudder of his drifting ship of fate and direct his talents to some grand and worthwhile goal.
When the oblique praise got to be too much for him, Paul baited his father by saying that he could clearly see the future for which his gifts had equipped him: directing a gambling establishment (if not something worse) in the deepest bowels of Calcutta, while telling jokes to amuse his criminal clientele, and shooting off the occasional round at a passing native for the purpose of helping them keep their population in check.
“There, you see?” Monsieur Treville said, shaking his head at Paul. “He pretends to make light of everything. But his day will come. His day will come. Yet he does make a telling point in this matter of checking population. There is no doubt that your Great Plague, Jean-Marc, had the effect of making peasant labor rare and valuable, and the agricultural laborer was able to use his newfound worth to raise himself out of serfdom. Great good flowing from great evil. Claude Bonnet made this point quite lucidly in his incisive study of….”
My attention wandered to Katya, whose features the candlelight touched with a delicate glow. I could see from her vague unfocused eyes that she was adrift from the table talk, her concentration on some inward and pleasant daydream. The curve of her full upper lip fascinated me. I thought of those soft lips against my own, and… I glanced at Paul just in time to find his eyes upon me with a studied frown. He looked down at his plate, then up again to his sister, and it seemed to me he was trying to penetrate her musings. I could not avoid a certain resentment at the way Paul had deceived me during that ride to Etcheverria when he had entertained me with imitations of local merchants, while all the time he knew that he had been in town arranging for his family to move away from Salies forever.
He glanced down again, his long lashes concealing his eyes, and I was struck yet again, and this time most uncomfortably, by how identical his face and Katya’s were, particularly in the half-light of the candles.
“….of course, Claude Bonnet is a fine scholar and a personal friend, so I would never bring this slight lapse of scholarship to his attention. I am sure you understand why, Jean-Marc. Jean-Marc?”
“Sir? Oh, yes. Of course.”
“I knew you would.” Monsieur Treville pushed himself up from the table. “And now… I have a treat for you. You’ll never guess what it is.”
“In that case it would be foolish of me to try,” Paul said.
“No, no. It’s a treat for Jean-Marc. In my study. You two go along. We’ll join you later.”
There was a hint of tension in Paul’s tone when he said, “Why don’t we all take coffee together, Papa.”
“No, no, no. I’ve this surprise for your young friend.”
“Can’t we all share it?” Katya asked, casting a troubled look in my direction.
“It wouldn’t be of interest to you, my dear. It’s…” He beamed at me with anticipatory relish. “…It’s a first edition of de Lanne! What do you say to that, young man?”
“Well… I don’t quite know what to say,” I confessed honestly.
“Aha, I’ll wager you never thought you would actually set your eyes on a first edition of the excellent Abbe’s benchmark study of the Great Death. You’ve read it, of course, but to hold a first edition in your hand… ah, that’s something, eh?”
“Yes… that’s something, indeed. Yes, indeed,” I stammered out. “A first edition! Well, well.”
As he drew me towards his study he confessed that, as I well knew, de Lanne’s work wasn’t of much importance in modern historiography—too liberally larded with myth and folktale, of course—but still there were not half a dozen first editions of the work in existence, and….
While I examined the calf-bound volume with more signs of interest than I felt, Monsieur Treville beamed at me, participating in what he assumed to be my excitement and delight. I leafed through, pausing now and again at a page and reading a passage with pretended concentration. I even dared the occasional “Ah, yes.”
“In some ways,” he mused, “history was grander before it was infected by impulses towards scientific accuracy. I know this is academic heresy, but I regret the replacement of Literature by Science as Clio’s closest ally. Research has been substituted for imagination; the True has fallen victim to the Actual. Our concentration on What happened and When has cost us insights into How and, more important, Why. Now, de Lanne there was quite free from the shackles of proof, and he… and he…” His voice faded in midsentence as his eye happened to fall on a bit of scribbled marginalia that captured his attention and drew him down into his padded desk chair, where he was soon comparing notes he had made with passages in two open books, absorbed and quite unaware of my presence.
The study, an interior room protected from the rising damp that made most of Etcheverria clammy and uncomfortable, was the coziest room in the house. Its walls were lined with bookcases, and volumes were piled on the floor together with manuscripts and journals and loose pages filled with Monsieur Treville’s spidery scrawl. Open books, clippings, and stacks of paper slumped in impertinent defiance of gravity on his cluttered desk in a kind of creative disarray that gave the impression that he could quickly locate any reference or note he wanted, provided his system of discriminate disorder were not ruined by being tidied up.
I found myself observing him fondly over the top of my book… Katya’s father… as he pored over his reading, frowning and making little grunts of doubt or hums of agreement, nervously dragging his fingers through his nest of unkempt grey hair. After a time he looked up vaguely, reeling in some thread of thought, and he was visibly startled to see me standing there. Then a smile of recognition brightened his worn features. “Fascinating book, eh?”
“Yes, sir. Fascinating.”
“I love the feel of an old book in the hand, don’t you? The smell of them. Aroma of learning.” He chuckled and gestured broadly towards his desk. “I’ll never finish it, of course. Not enough time left to me. But that doesn’t matter really. The attraction doesn’t lie in the accomplishment, but in the pursuit. The work. Have you ever pondered upon the way in which Time comes to us in so many disguises? For me, time is sand sifting through my fingers. Not enough of it. Can’t seem to grasp hold of it. While for my son, time is a heavy burden of boredom around his neck, something to be got rid of, something to be got through.
“And for Katya?”
“Ah, Katya… she who was once Hortense. So like her mother.” His work-stained eyes crinkled in an affectionate smile. “I sometimes wonder if Katya lives in the same web of time as the rest of us do. It’s all daydreams for her… smiles and spring flowers… fleeting fascinations. I often have the impression that she’s a temporary visitor from some other world. Some distant pastel world. So like her mother.”
“I believe I know what you mean, sir. But it’s not that she’s frivolous or shallow. Her observations are often quite incisive, and she has an excellent mind.”
“Yes, I suppose so.” He chuckled. “Do you know, I once found her studying anatomy. Human anatomy!”
“Yes, I know.”
His smile of paternal benevolence dissolved into a frown. “You know? How do you know?”
I shrugged it off. “Oh, she mentioned it in passing. Or perhaps Paul did. I don’t recall.”
“Oh, yes, I see.” He seemed to drift into thoughts of his own for a moment; then he said, “It feels good to have things all in order again.”
“Sir?”
He waved towards the piles of paper slumping on his desk. “For six months after we arrived here, I couldn’t find a thing. Everything was in boxes or in the wrong place. It was primordial chaos. I don’t believe my studies could survive another such debacle. I am comfortable here now. Books are where they belong, next to the books I want them next to, arranged in an order that only I know… two books purchased on the same rainy afternoon… two ideas that happen to be stacked one behind the other in the attic of my mind… opposing views set side by side… a book I like kept at an antiseptic distance from one I dislike—not a system the Bibliothиque nationale would approve, I daresay, but one that suits me perfectly.”
I wondered how he would face the disruption of moving yet again, when Paul deigned to inform him of his decision. “I know exactly what you mean,” I said. “In my own mind, certain medical facts are bound, illogically but forever, to certain swatches of verse for the simple reason that I learned them at the same time. And often, when I want to dredge up a bit of information I must first scan through the intervening poem.”
“Yes, yes, that’s it!” He was pleased to find another mind in which the clutter had shape and purpose. He nodded to himself; then he squinted up at me with an evaluating, conspiratorial expression. “You, ah… you mentioned this afternoon that you were born in the commune of Alos and were familiar with their Festival of the Drowned Virgin.”
“I used to attend every year before I went off to school. Everyone in my village did.”
“Fascinating. Fascinating. Ah… it is a three-day fкte beginning tomorrow, I believe?”
“Tomorrow?” I had to search my memory. “Why, yes. It does begin tomorrow, come to think of it.”
“And Alos is not so very far from here, I believe?”
I smiled at him. “Only twenty kilometers or so up into Haute Soule.”
He nodded. “Yes… yes. I’d give anything to observe with my own eyes the Parade of the Virgin and the performance of Robert le Diable… to talk to old people who remember how the festival used to be celebrated. Of course… I don’t speak Basque… and they might be reticent with an outsider. Now you, on the other hand… a native of the region…?”
“Sir, nothing could please more than to attend the fкte d’Alos with you.”
His eyes widened with innocence. “Oh, my dear fellow, I couldn’t dream of taking you from your duties at the clinic! No, no, you mustn’t think I was hinting that—”
“Sir, I have been seeking an excuse to go back to my natal commune after all the years away. Also, I have been seeking a way to repay some of your kindness and hospitality to me. It is very thoughtful of you to provide me with an opportunity to do both at the same time.”
“Oh? Is that so? Well…” He smiled broadly. “…If you insist on abandoning your duties in this profligate way…”
“I do, sir.”
“Grand! Grand!” He rose from his desk. “Let’s join the children for coffee. They’ll be pleased to hear that we are to have an outing. An adventure!”
I could not help wondering just how pleased Paul would be to find himself in the midst of the dancing and jostling and drinking and rowdiness that is the fabric of a Basque festival. I confess to feeling a certain unkind pleasure at the image of Paul attempting to maintain his aloof aplomb in such circumstances.
Before following Monsieur Treville from his study, I balanced the first edition on the toppling heap on his desk.
“No, no. Keep it. It’s yours. A gift from one scholar to another.”
“Oh, I couldn’t sir. It’s too valuable.”
“Nonsense. Accept it as a little token.” He placed his hand on my shoulder. “I am more pleased than I can say that you and Paul have become such friends. He is too much alone. And anyway, the Black Death is only a tangent aspect of my studies, while it is the very core of yours. The book is yours by Right of Need. I shall be angry with you if you do not accept it.”
To this day, I have the old calf-bound volume on my desk; never read; the only physical memento of the summer of Katya.
When we joined them in the salon, Paul and Katya were sitting together before the hearth, so involved in conversation that the untouched coffee had gone cold in their cups. From their slightly too vigorous greetings I took it that they had been talking about me, perhaps concerned lest I forget my promise to conceal from their father that Katya was the object of my interest in Etcheverria. I sought to set their minds at ease by showing them the book and describing in unnecessary detail the things Monsieur Treville and I had discussed.
I was surprised at Paul’s reaction to the news that we were all to embark tomorrow on an outing. With the first mention of it, he measured me with a long glance, as though wondering what deviousness I was up to. But Monsieur Treville’s childlike enthusiasm soon infected Katya, who decided that the trip should be broken by a picnic, and Paul went along with the proposal, amusing us by assuming the role of the grumpy, put-upon one who detested all outings and all alfresco dining.
The evening ended with Katya and Paul entertaining us with descriptions of pranks they had played as children—quite outrageous antics that Monsieur Treville disavowed any knowledge of. He pretended to be shocked at their disrespect for adults and relatives as he beamed at me and shook his head with that helpless admiration of the doting parent. The pranks had been based on the inability of houseguests to tell them apart when they were children and often dressed in the androgynous costumes then fashionable.
Towards the end of the evening, it was decided that we would depart for Alos one day thence, early in the morning so we could break our trip with Katya’s picnic and still arrive in time for the afternoon and evening festivities. Twenty kilometers would make a long ride back, and we would not return to Etcheverria until the small hours of the morning, but Katya was as excited as a child at the prospect of being up late into the night and riding in an open cariole under the brilliant midnight stars of that perfect summer.
Monsieur Treville grew sleepy and began to nod in his chair by the time I rose to leave. Paul invited me to come again tomorrow for tea after I had finished my duties at the clinic, and he was gracious enough to allow Katya and me a moment alone at the door, where we exchanged the simple words of polite parting with a softness of voice that implied more than it said. Katya placed her hand on my arm. “Thank you, Jean-Marc.”
“For what?”
“For arranging this outing with Papa. It will help to soften the blow of having to move again.”
“I don’t think of this as an outing with your father. I think of it as an outing with you. And for that, it’s I who give thanks.”
She lowered her eyes and pressed my arm.
As I walked back to Salies under a Prussian-blue sky of velvet alive with gemstars, a pervious heaven, I pondered the contrasts of the evening at Etcheverria: the gay chatter at dinner, over against Paul’s dark warnings; the facile joy Katya took in little things, in puns and pebbles, against her sudden retreats into melancholy reverie; the fumbling kindness of Monsieur Treville, against the fear his children had that he might learn of my affection for Katya. It was a canvas painted half in watery pastels, half in lurid impasto. And I had the disturbing conviction that it was the pastels that were artificial, a thin wash to cover more foreboding textures.
Upon reaching my rooms, I found a note from Doctor Gros under my door telling me that he had tried to contact me and that I must visit him at once in his flat attached to the clinic. When I arrived he was obviously annoyed at having sought me without success, but his annoyance was nothing to mine when I discovered he intended to leave the village for two days, and I would have to remain in Salies on call for emergencies until his return.
“But I have made plans that will be awkward to change,” I complained. “Is this trip of yours absolutely vital?”
“It is more than absolutely vital; it’s a matter of pleasure-seeking,” he said, offering me a brandy which I waved away. “One of my dear lady patients has requested that I accompany her to St. Jean de Luz. She’s a widow who takes the cures at various watering places for the purpose of mitigating the discomforts of her celibate state. Under normal conditions, nothing would please me more than to leave you free to pursue your pleasures, unencumbered by duty, but unfortunately some years ago I took a solemn vow abjuring all impulses to waste such sexual opportunities as come my way. Think of me as a victim of Honor, unable to break an oath. And think of yourself as a victim of circumstance. You’re sure you won’t have a little glass?”
“Couldn’t I attend to the clinic during the day and be free in the evenings at least?”
“I’m afraid not, Montjean. Oh, if it were only our lady patients with their hot flashes and cold hearts, I wouldn’t care one way or the other. But, with me away, you will be the only doctor in the parish, and we do have our share of genuine problems—our births, our broken bones, our distressed livers, the occasional miraculous pregnancy of an unmarried milkmaid. It all has to do with that oath of yours. Surely you remember it… so recently taken. Did I forget to offer you some brandy?”
“I don’t want any,” I said bitterly.
“Oh, cheer up, man! What’s two days to you, a youth whose primary asset in life is Time? If you look at it just right, I am more to be pitied than you. I shall be embarking only on a tawdry little affair; while you, if I do not misread the symptoms, are in the throes of love. Believe me, young man, you have no grounds for envy. You will be left with fertile memories; I shall be left with only a strong urge to bathe.”
“Yes, but—”
“Perhaps I should put it this way: I intend to leave tomorrow morning, and there’s no point in our debating the matter.”
Lacking alternative, and with a minimal display of good graces, I agreed to attend to the clinic and to remain in the village until his return. But I extracted his promise to pass by Etcheverria on his way and explain why I would not be able to take tea with them that day, or attend the fкte d’Alos the next.
“A commission I shall undertake with pleasure. But a sense of fair play requires me to warn you that, once your young woman casts her eyes on my virile features, untrammelled by beauty or even conventional regularity, I cannot be held accountable for her heart. You’re sure you won’t have a little glass?”
The following day I was harnessed to the routine of the clinic, including a visit to the watering station in Doctor Gros’s stead. His tourist/patients were not delighted to find the crusty old doctor with whom they could share their giggling little double entendres replaced by a young man who appeared crisp and unsympathetic to their imagined maladies.
Late that afternoon the featureless routine was broken by the dramatic arrival of a Basque peasant lad who had caught his sleeve in a farm machine. I was able to staunch the bleeding and save the arm, and I received the tearful gratitude of the panicked mother and even a reluctant handshake from the taciturn father, who, having watched the operation in grim and desperate silence until he was sure the boy was out of danger, then manifest his love and relief by being furious with the lad for risking so precious a life. Because the mother had no French, I had spoken to them in Basque, and I could sense their discomfort at the realization that this doctor was one of them. Like most proud and oppressed minorities, the Basque have developed a defensive armour of racial superiority requiring them to assert that the Basques are better farmers, dancers, lovemakers, fighters, and predictors of weather than the French or Spanish majorities amongst whom they live. But, at the same time, when it comes to important matters like lawsuits or illness, they cannot avoid a deep feeling that it would be wiser to have their affairs and lives in the hands of a cultured outlander. The most brutalizing effect of prejudice is that the victims come to believe, at a deep and unconfessed level, the stereotypes established by the oppressor. For this reason, the father of the injured boy was all the more relieved when it became clear that his son’s life was to be spared and his usefulness around the farm undiminished. He went so far as to offer me a glass of Izarra, although his peasant wariness made him ask how much I intended to steal from him for this slight medical attention.
As I was washing up after they left, I reflected on how Doctor Gros’s insistence that I remain in Salies had been vindicated, for the lad had been rushed into the clinic a little after four o’clock, when I might have been taking a cup of tea on the terrace of Etcheverria. It also occurred to me that, for the first time since I looked up from under my straw boater and saw Katya approaching across the park green, I had passed an hour without the image of her on my inner eye. It was my first experience of the emotional anodyne to be found in working at a calling, rather than a profession—that daily narcotic that was to numb the slow passage of the years following the summer of Katya.
After the clinic closed for the night, the hours dragged by ponderously while, before I had met Katya, I had easily filled my time with scribbling verses, reading novels, and daydreaming about the excitements and challenges of my future. To relieve the monotony, I left my boardinghouse and crossed the square to one of the cafйs. But the conversation at the tables and up and down the zinc bar centered on the impending war with Germany: warnings from Paris; threats from Berlin; saber-rattling from beleaguered, confused Austria; scabbard-rattling from vast, hollow Russia. Some of the older men remembered the wounded gloire of the 1870 War, and spoke of humiliating Germany, of recovering Alsace, of “France to the Rhine!” I found this martial frenzy and drunken jingoism disgusting… and frightening. So I returned to the solitude of my room.
I have before me the notes I scribbled in my journal that night, and the parenthetical comments on those notes added several years later, after the war was over and I was established as the village doctor of Alos. I share them with you uncorrected, revealing the youthful pedantry of Greek-letter rubrics and my romantic pseudo-philosophic assumptions, and also sharing with you the bitter postwar disenchantment of the parenthetical notes.
Alpha: This horrid war will never materialize! (It did.)
Beta: If war does come, it will be brief because human flesh and emotions cannot withstand modern machines of death and mutilation. (It was not brief. The flesh did withstand the death and mutilation. The emotions did not.)
Gamma: If I am called to the colors, I shall flee to Switzerland in protest against this madness. (I did not. I no longer cared.)
Delta: Even in the brutality of war, a man of poetry, a man of inner resources, should be able to fight without becoming an animal, to rise above the slaughter and maintain his spiritual dignity. (Bullshit.)
After an uneventful morning, I was taking the plat du jour luncheon at my usual cafй under the arcade, insensitive to the sparkling beauty of the weather, my thoughts concentrated on Katya and Etcheverria.
“Are you receiving guests?”
“What?” I was startled out of my reverie. “I beg your— Katya? What a surprise. Oh… and Paul.”
“I take it you recommend this restaurant?” Paul asked, looking around with distaste.
I rose and gestured them to join me, which Katya did with a warm smile. But Paul remained standing. “I have a few errands to attend to. But when I return I should be delighted to accept… oh, anything that can’t be ruined by the chef. A glass of water, perhaps? We’ve been trudging along that dusty road for hours… perhaps for weeks. I no longer recall. The torture of it has blurred my memory.”
“Yes,” Katya said, “I convinced Paul to walk with me. It’s a gorgeous day, and the fresh air and exercise are good for him.”
“I wonder why everything that is good for one is either dull or painful? Why is everything that is repulsive to the flesh assumed to be good for the character?”
“Oh, rubbish! It was good for you. For my part, I am ravenous. That looks good, Jean-Marc. Will you order some for me?”
“With pleasure.” I signaled the waiter.
“I should warn you,” Paul said, “that she has the gastronomic indiscretion of a Pygmy. I wonder we have any furniture left in the house.”
“Oh, really, Paul!”
“Don’t ‘oh, really’ me. I’ve seen you glance covetously at the ottoman when you’re feeling peckish. Don’t try to deny it. Do you know what she did on the way here, Jean-Marc? With total disregard of my social embarrassment, she pushed her way through a hedge and snatched an apple from a tree—a vulgar apple from a living tree! And she ate it. Fell upon the wretched vegetable and manducated it. Chomp, grind, munch, gnash… and all that was left was a disgusting core.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “she has an appetite for life that ought not to be denied expression.” A slight movement of his eyebrows told me that he had read my meaning.
“It was delicious, actually,” Katya said. “A little green and tart, but delicious.”
“Then what did she do?” Paul asked, all mock outrage. “In emulation of perfidious Eve, she offered to fetch one for me. For me! Can you picture Paul Etienne Jean-Marie de Treville trudging along the road, pushing pome fruits into his mouth? Then for the next two or three hundred kilometers she babbled on about the glories of nature, cooing over garish weeds that choked the roadside—”
“Wildflowers,” Katya clarified.
“—and pretending that the damned things had names (both Latin and vulgar) and that there was some unstipulated virtue in my learning them. As though I intended ever again to submit my body to the tortures of an overland trek! Now, I will concede that some of the names had a kind of ironic rightness… goatsbreath, frogsbane, stenchpoppy—”
“He’s making those up.”
“—but others were as stickily saccharine as her gushing enthusiasm. Sweetheart’s joy, love’s sigh, passion’s heart, lust’s elbow—”
“Didn’t you promise us that you had to run off to perform errands?” Katya asked.
“And indeed I have. I must haggle with the local merchants about the storage and shipment of our impedimenta. You two will have to suffer along without my company for a quarter of an hour. But I warn you, Montjean. Feed her quickly, or be prepared to stand guard over treasured family knickknacks, porcelain vases, umbrella racks, that sort of thing. Anyone who would eat an apple in its raw state, with the stench of tree all over it, would eat anything.” And with a wave of his hand he departed down the arcade.
Katya smiled after him.
“Your brother seems chipper enough,” I said, after the waiter had brought her plat du jour and departed.
“Hm-m. We had a delightful walk. He knows how it makes me laugh when he plays at being shocked and horrified by everything pertaining to nature.”
“Katya, I am so sorry that things came up to interfere with our plans. I know I’ve ruined your father’s hopes to attend the fкte d’Alos. You did get my message, I hope?”
“Yes, we did. And your Dr. Gros… what a charming man.”
“You found him charming?”
“Hm-m. Don’t you?”
“If I were asked to list a thousand words describing him, ‘charming’ would appear nowhere.”
“Why is that?”
“Because his philandering has cost me two days with you. Two precious days, when we have so few that—”
“—Don’t let’s talk about the time we shall not have together. It’s pointless and saddening. Let’s talk about the time we shall have. Our trip to the fкte d’Alos is not ruined. We’ve simply decided to delay it until tomorrow. And I’ve heard that the last day of a fкte is the most exciting anyway.”
“Well… it’s the least inhibited. It’s quite common for birth dates in Basque villages to fall nine months after the last day of the fкte, with hasty marriages sandwiched in between.”
“Speaking of sandwiches, I’ve planned out the picnic we’ll have on our way. We’ll eat out in the fields—perhaps in an orchard.”
“I’m sure Paul is bursting with anticipation.”
“Oh, he’ll grouse and complain to amuse us, but I don’t care how he feels about it. We must take advantage of this magnificent weather. As soon as the idea occurred to me, I had to come into Salies to tell you. When I asked Paul if I might, he was hesitant, but then he offered to accompany me. I know you don’t like him, but he’s always been very kind to me. And, do you know what? I really think he likes you… in his own reluctant way. Does that surprise you?”
“It does indeed. He’s uniquely skillful at concealing his affection.”
“Oh, Paul’s like that.” She smiled at me, and my heart expanded in my chest.
“I thought about you constantly all through yesterday, Katya.”
“Constantly? Your attention wasn’t on your work for even a single second?”
“Well, almost constantly, then.”
“Relatively constantly?”
“Almost relatively constantly, at least.”
“I’m pleased. I thought about you, too. Not quite constantly, or even relatively constantly, but often… and with pleasure. I sat for hours down in my library at the bottom of the garden, reading a book… well, not exactly reading it. More reading at it. Staring through the words and letting my mind wander. The garden was so lovely… tangled, overgrown… the warmth of the sun on my face… the somnolent hum of insects. It was so peaceful.”
“And your little ghost? Was she peaceful too?”
She set her fork down and looked at me. “How on earth did you know that?”
“Know what?”
“That the young girl was… not happy, exactly… peaceful. Several times I felt her presence. Like a melody sung just out of hearing. But there wasn’t the sweet sadness that I used to feel flowing from her. There was a kind of… of muted joy. But how could you have known about that?”
“I didn’t really.”
“What are you trying to convince us you didn’t do?” Paul asked, appearing from behind the arcades and joining us at the table. “Don’t believe him, Katya. I am sure he did it. It’s just like him to do that sort of thing—whatever it was. Tell me, do you think the waiter might be prompted to give me a glass of the fluid that passes locally for wine?”
I beckoned the waiter and gestured for the wine. “Would you like some coffee, Katya?”
“Yes, please. No, on second thought, I must go around to the shops. There are a few things I want to get for tomorrow’s picnic.” She rose. “No, don’t get up. Thank you for the luncheon, Jean-Marc. That coat rack was particularly delicious.”
Paul and I smiled her away; then I turned to him. “Katya tells me she finally gave in to your begging and arranged a picnic for tomorrow.”
“I can hardly wait. Crouching uncomfortably on the ground, nibbling at dry sandwiches, dust blowing into the food, to say nothing of the small creatures that will attend as uninvited guests. In my view, eating out of doors is like fornicating on a busy boulevard. The basic biological impulses should be satisfied in private—or at least in company of a few understanding friends.”
The waiter brought his wine. “Ah,” he said, draining the glass then shuddering with a grimace. “It’s sometimes difficult to recall that, with the benefit of a few incantations, this swill can become the blood of Christ.”
“Katya tells me we shall all be going to the fкte d’Alos after all.”
“Katya tells you everything, it would seem. Yes, we shall be going. Father is looking forward to it with the anticipation of a child.”
I was silent for a moment. “Paul,” I began—
“—There’s something in your tone that suggests you’re preparing to give me advice… the only thing genuinely more blessed to give than receive.”
“Not advice, exactly. I was thinking about your father.”
“And?”
“The other evening, in his study, he mentioned that he didn’t think he could stand another move… all his books and papers in chaos… nothing where he could find it.”
“It’s good of you to concern yourself so with my affairs. But you will forgive me if I find something self-serving in your desire to see my family remain here, won’t you?”
“I presume you haven’t told your father about your plans yet.”
“As it happens, you’re mistaken—a condition I suppose you’ve become used to after all your years of blundering about in other people’s affairs. In fact, I told Father about the move last night.”
“And how did he take it?”
“Not well, of course. However, he understood the necessity and trusted my judgment. But then, he is equipped with some knowledge of our circumstances and does not, like you, make evaluations from the basis of abysmal ignorance. I do hope that doesn’t sound harsh or critical. Listen here, Montjean. Let’s you and I make a pact. Let’s do what we can to make tomorrow a fine and amusing day for Katya and Papa. I shall do my part. I shall participate in the press and sweat of a rural festival, a smile of delight frozen to my face. I shall force cold food into my mouth while sitting on dirt. Greater love hath no man for his sister. Ah… and here comes the woman in question bearing in her basket, I fear, all kinds of nasty comestibles for alfresco gorging… lots of juicy things designed to drip onto clothing.” He rose. “May we expect you sometime midmorning?”
He joined Katya in the middle of the square, and they left towards Etcheverria, after she waved to me and mouthed, “Until tomorrow.”
I sat for a time, looking across the square dazzling with sunlight. I could not quite articulate the ambivalence of my feelings, because to do so required confessing to a petty resentment of Katya’s ability to face our forthcoming separation with so much more equanimity than I. To be sure, there was an element of courage in her attitude, of dealing gracefully with the inevitable. But where does strength leave off and callousness begin? What is the boundary between courage and indifference? And what of my own behavior? Had I not chatted urbanely with Paul, joking about picnics, when Katya’s happiness was at stake? Are we not all victims of social training, of “good form,” which requires us to face the greatest calamity with a certain grace and style? We would rather be destroyed than embarrassed.
And I thought of the forthcoming war that had been the talk of the cafй the past night. Would the young men called to arms laugh and joke and exchange hearty platitudes in imitation of popular fiction, while they waited to be mutilated by the stupidity and arrogance of aged politicians? Could the youth of France be so gullible?
He waved my objections aside impatiently. “At all events, you know what I mean. If you agree to these conditions, then Katya will have your company—which, for reasons that escape understanding, she seems to take pleasure in—and you will have seven whole days of her charm and gentleness. I realize of course that you have dreamt of a lifetime of Katya, and I can’t really blame you. The lowly moth dreams of possessing the moon. But seven days is better than nothing. And, believe me,” he enunciated each word clearly, “nothing is your only alternative.” He sat back and pressed his thumb and forefinger into his eye sockets to relieve his fatigue.
“Are you finished?” I asked.
“Not quite.” He spoke without opening his eyes. “You must also undertake to assist me in keeping Father in his accustomed state of ignorance as to events around him.”
“Are you through now?”
“Probably not. But you have been good enough to hear me out with few interruptions. I suppose I must offer you the same consideration.”
“First, it is unjust of you to imply that I pried into your affairs to learn that you were making arrangements to leave Etcheverria. You must know that everything immediately becomes public knowledge in a provincial village. I learned of it quite by accident from my colleague, Dr. Gros.”
“Very well. How you found out is of little importance. My real objection is to your blurting it out to Katya with no concern about the shock it must have been to her.”
“I had no way to know that you were withholding your plans from her. I naturally assumed that something affecting her life so intensely would not be done behind her back.”
“Pain delayed is pain lessened.”
“Then you admit that she does not want to go? That leaving here will be painful for her?”
“I have never denied that. But the pain of leaving is nothing to the danger of staying.”
“So you tell me. But you refuse to explain what this great danger is.”
“You have no right to an explanation.”
“I believe that my feelings for Katya give me that right.”
“You are quite mistaken in that belief.”
“That’s your view.”
“My view is the only one that matters.”
“That, too, is merely your view.”
“Would I be correct in assuming that we have reached an impasse?”
I hated the lazy, nasal tone of his voice and the half-closed eyes settled on me as though I were an inanimate thing. But after a short pause I continued, “You obviously sought to hurt me by mentioning other men who have loved Katya. And I’ll confess that you succeeded to a degree. I had indeed thought she was somewhat younger than I, rather than somewhat older, and if the question of other loves before me had entered my mind—and it did not—I suppose I would have assumed that I was her first love, as she is mine.”
He looked at me with distant curiosity. “You really assume that Katya loves you? Have you any evidence for that?—beyond, of course, the heart having reasons the mind knows not of, and all that trash?”
I chose not to respond because, in fact, I had no evidence at all that she was more than fond of me. Describing more what I wished I felt than what I did, I said, “A man who loves a woman should feel a certain… gratitude, I suppose… towards anyone who has also loved and brought pleasure to her. You and I, in different ways, both love her. We ought not to be at odds with each other. I accept the fact that you think you’re doing what’s best for her. I think you’re terribly wrong, but I don’t doubt your motives. Whatever it is that you’re running away from, I am sure it’s wrong of you to deny Katya a chance to make a life for herself. But I don’t doubt your love for her.”
His customary expression of weary hauteur relaxed, and there was a trace of compassion in his voice when he said, “Perhaps I was cruelly vague when I spoke of the ‘men’ who had loved her. There was only one. In Paris. And I never meant to imply that she loved him in return. She was kind to him. She doubtless took pleasure in his company. But love? I rather doubt it.”
I tried to conceal the relief and comfort I found in this suggestion that I was her first love. “And what happened to this young man in Paris?”
Paul settled his metallic eyes on me for a moment. Then he rose from his chair. “All this is a bit oblique to the point. The question is: Do you intend to accept the conditions I have made? Or would you rather not see Katya again.”
“Before I answer, let me… Paul, obviously there is something here, some terrible thing, that you think you must flee from. Perhaps I could help in some way, if you would share the problem with me.”
“That is out of the question. There’s nothing you could possibly do—save perhaps make things worse.”
“Let me try!”
“There’s nothing you could do, I tell you! And I cannot discuss this further with you. Now… what about my conditions?”
“What choice have I, other than to accept them?”
“You could choose not to see Katya again. But I don’t expect you to make that nobler choice.”
“As indeed I shall not. Very well. I accept your conditions.” I rose. “Now I shall join Katya at the bottom of the garden, if that does not fall within your definition of ‘sneaking off.’ “
He waved me away listlessly. “Just so you remember your promise to keep your hands off her.”
I remembered the promise; but I had no intention of keeping it. I was convinced that I must do whatever I could to save Katya from a shattered life wasted in running from place to place each time Paul was frightened by shadowy dreads.
“You know, Montjean…” Paul’s bored drawl stopped me just as I reached the terrace door. I turned to find him slouched down in his chair, his free hand over his face and his eyes closed. “It’s true that we could never have been friends, even under the best of conditions—breeding, social worlds, tastes, all that business. But you’d be mistaken to think I dislike you. A moment ago, you said something rather good about having a certain affection for those who have loved Katya. I am not immune to such feelings myself. No, I don’t dislike you, Montjean. In fact, I find you rather…” He was silent for a moment. “Oh, never mind.” He shrugged away the rest of his explanation and reverted to his former tone. “I daresay you intend to impose your company upon us at supper?”
“How could I decline so gracious an invitation?”
He smiled wanly. “Ah, now that’s more like it.”
* * *
Supper consisted of the same hardy rural menu as before, a thick potage, salad, local bread, local cheese, local wine, but the atmosphere was quite festive, as Monsieur Treville was in good spirits.
“There you see, Paul?” Monsieur Treville said with the teasing tone he had affected throughout the meal. “Jean-Marc attacks his cheese with honest vigor. Not like you, who finds it insufficiently delicate for your refined tastes.” Partway through supper, after having addressed me alternately as Doctor Montjean and Doctor Jean Marque (and once, out of nowhere, as Doctor Jean Mont), he surrendered to his confusion and began using my given name. He seemed to be experiencing a surge of affection for his son and was expressing it, as I have seen other fathers do, in the emotionally safe way of banter, using my presence as an opportunity to trot forth each of his son’s qualities, which he compared to mine in a tone that seemed to criticize Paul, but which never failed to accent his good points. He noted that I had worked hard at my studies, making the best of my limited opportunities and gifts (some fluster and apology as he assured me that he meant to say that my opportunities were limited, not my gifts), while Paul, miserable person that he was, had idled away his time and wasted his native brilliance, wit, and uncommon celerity of intellect. I had used such leisure as I had to delve into the Black Death that had so altered the course of history as to shock Europe out of the Dark Ages, while Paul had applied himself to the futile activities of becoming the best shot in Paris, a leader of the most promising young society, a champion amateur kick-boxer, and a much-sought-after decoration to any social event. And on it went; my having done all the dull correct things, and poor Paul having squandered his endless gifts (each one detailed). But by no means were we to understand that Paul’s life was a desert of wasted opportunities. No, the clear implication was that, any day now, he would grasp the rudder of his drifting ship of fate and direct his talents to some grand and worthwhile goal.
When the oblique praise got to be too much for him, Paul baited his father by saying that he could clearly see the future for which his gifts had equipped him: directing a gambling establishment (if not something worse) in the deepest bowels of Calcutta, while telling jokes to amuse his criminal clientele, and shooting off the occasional round at a passing native for the purpose of helping them keep their population in check.
“There, you see?” Monsieur Treville said, shaking his head at Paul. “He pretends to make light of everything. But his day will come. His day will come. Yet he does make a telling point in this matter of checking population. There is no doubt that your Great Plague, Jean-Marc, had the effect of making peasant labor rare and valuable, and the agricultural laborer was able to use his newfound worth to raise himself out of serfdom. Great good flowing from great evil. Claude Bonnet made this point quite lucidly in his incisive study of….”
My attention wandered to Katya, whose features the candlelight touched with a delicate glow. I could see from her vague unfocused eyes that she was adrift from the table talk, her concentration on some inward and pleasant daydream. The curve of her full upper lip fascinated me. I thought of those soft lips against my own, and… I glanced at Paul just in time to find his eyes upon me with a studied frown. He looked down at his plate, then up again to his sister, and it seemed to me he was trying to penetrate her musings. I could not avoid a certain resentment at the way Paul had deceived me during that ride to Etcheverria when he had entertained me with imitations of local merchants, while all the time he knew that he had been in town arranging for his family to move away from Salies forever.
He glanced down again, his long lashes concealing his eyes, and I was struck yet again, and this time most uncomfortably, by how identical his face and Katya’s were, particularly in the half-light of the candles.
“….of course, Claude Bonnet is a fine scholar and a personal friend, so I would never bring this slight lapse of scholarship to his attention. I am sure you understand why, Jean-Marc. Jean-Marc?”
“Sir? Oh, yes. Of course.”
“I knew you would.” Monsieur Treville pushed himself up from the table. “And now… I have a treat for you. You’ll never guess what it is.”
“In that case it would be foolish of me to try,” Paul said.
“No, no. It’s a treat for Jean-Marc. In my study. You two go along. We’ll join you later.”
There was a hint of tension in Paul’s tone when he said, “Why don’t we all take coffee together, Papa.”
“No, no, no. I’ve this surprise for your young friend.”
“Can’t we all share it?” Katya asked, casting a troubled look in my direction.
“It wouldn’t be of interest to you, my dear. It’s…” He beamed at me with anticipatory relish. “…It’s a first edition of de Lanne! What do you say to that, young man?”
“Well… I don’t quite know what to say,” I confessed honestly.
“Aha, I’ll wager you never thought you would actually set your eyes on a first edition of the excellent Abbe’s benchmark study of the Great Death. You’ve read it, of course, but to hold a first edition in your hand… ah, that’s something, eh?”
“Yes… that’s something, indeed. Yes, indeed,” I stammered out. “A first edition! Well, well.”
As he drew me towards his study he confessed that, as I well knew, de Lanne’s work wasn’t of much importance in modern historiography—too liberally larded with myth and folktale, of course—but still there were not half a dozen first editions of the work in existence, and….
While I examined the calf-bound volume with more signs of interest than I felt, Monsieur Treville beamed at me, participating in what he assumed to be my excitement and delight. I leafed through, pausing now and again at a page and reading a passage with pretended concentration. I even dared the occasional “Ah, yes.”
“In some ways,” he mused, “history was grander before it was infected by impulses towards scientific accuracy. I know this is academic heresy, but I regret the replacement of Literature by Science as Clio’s closest ally. Research has been substituted for imagination; the True has fallen victim to the Actual. Our concentration on What happened and When has cost us insights into How and, more important, Why. Now, de Lanne there was quite free from the shackles of proof, and he… and he…” His voice faded in midsentence as his eye happened to fall on a bit of scribbled marginalia that captured his attention and drew him down into his padded desk chair, where he was soon comparing notes he had made with passages in two open books, absorbed and quite unaware of my presence.
The study, an interior room protected from the rising damp that made most of Etcheverria clammy and uncomfortable, was the coziest room in the house. Its walls were lined with bookcases, and volumes were piled on the floor together with manuscripts and journals and loose pages filled with Monsieur Treville’s spidery scrawl. Open books, clippings, and stacks of paper slumped in impertinent defiance of gravity on his cluttered desk in a kind of creative disarray that gave the impression that he could quickly locate any reference or note he wanted, provided his system of discriminate disorder were not ruined by being tidied up.
I found myself observing him fondly over the top of my book… Katya’s father… as he pored over his reading, frowning and making little grunts of doubt or hums of agreement, nervously dragging his fingers through his nest of unkempt grey hair. After a time he looked up vaguely, reeling in some thread of thought, and he was visibly startled to see me standing there. Then a smile of recognition brightened his worn features. “Fascinating book, eh?”
“Yes, sir. Fascinating.”
“I love the feel of an old book in the hand, don’t you? The smell of them. Aroma of learning.” He chuckled and gestured broadly towards his desk. “I’ll never finish it, of course. Not enough time left to me. But that doesn’t matter really. The attraction doesn’t lie in the accomplishment, but in the pursuit. The work. Have you ever pondered upon the way in which Time comes to us in so many disguises? For me, time is sand sifting through my fingers. Not enough of it. Can’t seem to grasp hold of it. While for my son, time is a heavy burden of boredom around his neck, something to be got rid of, something to be got through.
“And for Katya?”
“Ah, Katya… she who was once Hortense. So like her mother.” His work-stained eyes crinkled in an affectionate smile. “I sometimes wonder if Katya lives in the same web of time as the rest of us do. It’s all daydreams for her… smiles and spring flowers… fleeting fascinations. I often have the impression that she’s a temporary visitor from some other world. Some distant pastel world. So like her mother.”
“I believe I know what you mean, sir. But it’s not that she’s frivolous or shallow. Her observations are often quite incisive, and she has an excellent mind.”
“Yes, I suppose so.” He chuckled. “Do you know, I once found her studying anatomy. Human anatomy!”
“Yes, I know.”
His smile of paternal benevolence dissolved into a frown. “You know? How do you know?”
I shrugged it off. “Oh, she mentioned it in passing. Or perhaps Paul did. I don’t recall.”
“Oh, yes, I see.” He seemed to drift into thoughts of his own for a moment; then he said, “It feels good to have things all in order again.”
“Sir?”
He waved towards the piles of paper slumping on his desk. “For six months after we arrived here, I couldn’t find a thing. Everything was in boxes or in the wrong place. It was primordial chaos. I don’t believe my studies could survive another such debacle. I am comfortable here now. Books are where they belong, next to the books I want them next to, arranged in an order that only I know… two books purchased on the same rainy afternoon… two ideas that happen to be stacked one behind the other in the attic of my mind… opposing views set side by side… a book I like kept at an antiseptic distance from one I dislike—not a system the Bibliothиque nationale would approve, I daresay, but one that suits me perfectly.”
I wondered how he would face the disruption of moving yet again, when Paul deigned to inform him of his decision. “I know exactly what you mean,” I said. “In my own mind, certain medical facts are bound, illogically but forever, to certain swatches of verse for the simple reason that I learned them at the same time. And often, when I want to dredge up a bit of information I must first scan through the intervening poem.”
“Yes, yes, that’s it!” He was pleased to find another mind in which the clutter had shape and purpose. He nodded to himself; then he squinted up at me with an evaluating, conspiratorial expression. “You, ah… you mentioned this afternoon that you were born in the commune of Alos and were familiar with their Festival of the Drowned Virgin.”
“I used to attend every year before I went off to school. Everyone in my village did.”
“Fascinating. Fascinating. Ah… it is a three-day fкte beginning tomorrow, I believe?”
“Tomorrow?” I had to search my memory. “Why, yes. It does begin tomorrow, come to think of it.”
“And Alos is not so very far from here, I believe?”
I smiled at him. “Only twenty kilometers or so up into Haute Soule.”
He nodded. “Yes… yes. I’d give anything to observe with my own eyes the Parade of the Virgin and the performance of Robert le Diable… to talk to old people who remember how the festival used to be celebrated. Of course… I don’t speak Basque… and they might be reticent with an outsider. Now you, on the other hand… a native of the region…?”
“Sir, nothing could please more than to attend the fкte d’Alos with you.”
His eyes widened with innocence. “Oh, my dear fellow, I couldn’t dream of taking you from your duties at the clinic! No, no, you mustn’t think I was hinting that—”
“Sir, I have been seeking an excuse to go back to my natal commune after all the years away. Also, I have been seeking a way to repay some of your kindness and hospitality to me. It is very thoughtful of you to provide me with an opportunity to do both at the same time.”
“Oh? Is that so? Well…” He smiled broadly. “…If you insist on abandoning your duties in this profligate way…”
“I do, sir.”
“Grand! Grand!” He rose from his desk. “Let’s join the children for coffee. They’ll be pleased to hear that we are to have an outing. An adventure!”
I could not help wondering just how pleased Paul would be to find himself in the midst of the dancing and jostling and drinking and rowdiness that is the fabric of a Basque festival. I confess to feeling a certain unkind pleasure at the image of Paul attempting to maintain his aloof aplomb in such circumstances.
Before following Monsieur Treville from his study, I balanced the first edition on the toppling heap on his desk.
“No, no. Keep it. It’s yours. A gift from one scholar to another.”
“Oh, I couldn’t sir. It’s too valuable.”
“Nonsense. Accept it as a little token.” He placed his hand on my shoulder. “I am more pleased than I can say that you and Paul have become such friends. He is too much alone. And anyway, the Black Death is only a tangent aspect of my studies, while it is the very core of yours. The book is yours by Right of Need. I shall be angry with you if you do not accept it.”
* * *
To this day, I have the old calf-bound volume on my desk; never read; the only physical memento of the summer of Katya.
* * *
When we joined them in the salon, Paul and Katya were sitting together before the hearth, so involved in conversation that the untouched coffee had gone cold in their cups. From their slightly too vigorous greetings I took it that they had been talking about me, perhaps concerned lest I forget my promise to conceal from their father that Katya was the object of my interest in Etcheverria. I sought to set their minds at ease by showing them the book and describing in unnecessary detail the things Monsieur Treville and I had discussed.
I was surprised at Paul’s reaction to the news that we were all to embark tomorrow on an outing. With the first mention of it, he measured me with a long glance, as though wondering what deviousness I was up to. But Monsieur Treville’s childlike enthusiasm soon infected Katya, who decided that the trip should be broken by a picnic, and Paul went along with the proposal, amusing us by assuming the role of the grumpy, put-upon one who detested all outings and all alfresco dining.
The evening ended with Katya and Paul entertaining us with descriptions of pranks they had played as children—quite outrageous antics that Monsieur Treville disavowed any knowledge of. He pretended to be shocked at their disrespect for adults and relatives as he beamed at me and shook his head with that helpless admiration of the doting parent. The pranks had been based on the inability of houseguests to tell them apart when they were children and often dressed in the androgynous costumes then fashionable.
Towards the end of the evening, it was decided that we would depart for Alos one day thence, early in the morning so we could break our trip with Katya’s picnic and still arrive in time for the afternoon and evening festivities. Twenty kilometers would make a long ride back, and we would not return to Etcheverria until the small hours of the morning, but Katya was as excited as a child at the prospect of being up late into the night and riding in an open cariole under the brilliant midnight stars of that perfect summer.
Monsieur Treville grew sleepy and began to nod in his chair by the time I rose to leave. Paul invited me to come again tomorrow for tea after I had finished my duties at the clinic, and he was gracious enough to allow Katya and me a moment alone at the door, where we exchanged the simple words of polite parting with a softness of voice that implied more than it said. Katya placed her hand on my arm. “Thank you, Jean-Marc.”
“For what?”
“For arranging this outing with Papa. It will help to soften the blow of having to move again.”
“I don’t think of this as an outing with your father. I think of it as an outing with you. And for that, it’s I who give thanks.”
She lowered her eyes and pressed my arm.
* * *
As I walked back to Salies under a Prussian-blue sky of velvet alive with gemstars, a pervious heaven, I pondered the contrasts of the evening at Etcheverria: the gay chatter at dinner, over against Paul’s dark warnings; the facile joy Katya took in little things, in puns and pebbles, against her sudden retreats into melancholy reverie; the fumbling kindness of Monsieur Treville, against the fear his children had that he might learn of my affection for Katya. It was a canvas painted half in watery pastels, half in lurid impasto. And I had the disturbing conviction that it was the pastels that were artificial, a thin wash to cover more foreboding textures.
Upon reaching my rooms, I found a note from Doctor Gros under my door telling me that he had tried to contact me and that I must visit him at once in his flat attached to the clinic. When I arrived he was obviously annoyed at having sought me without success, but his annoyance was nothing to mine when I discovered he intended to leave the village for two days, and I would have to remain in Salies on call for emergencies until his return.
“But I have made plans that will be awkward to change,” I complained. “Is this trip of yours absolutely vital?”
“It is more than absolutely vital; it’s a matter of pleasure-seeking,” he said, offering me a brandy which I waved away. “One of my dear lady patients has requested that I accompany her to St. Jean de Luz. She’s a widow who takes the cures at various watering places for the purpose of mitigating the discomforts of her celibate state. Under normal conditions, nothing would please me more than to leave you free to pursue your pleasures, unencumbered by duty, but unfortunately some years ago I took a solemn vow abjuring all impulses to waste such sexual opportunities as come my way. Think of me as a victim of Honor, unable to break an oath. And think of yourself as a victim of circumstance. You’re sure you won’t have a little glass?”
“Couldn’t I attend to the clinic during the day and be free in the evenings at least?”
“I’m afraid not, Montjean. Oh, if it were only our lady patients with their hot flashes and cold hearts, I wouldn’t care one way or the other. But, with me away, you will be the only doctor in the parish, and we do have our share of genuine problems—our births, our broken bones, our distressed livers, the occasional miraculous pregnancy of an unmarried milkmaid. It all has to do with that oath of yours. Surely you remember it… so recently taken. Did I forget to offer you some brandy?”
“I don’t want any,” I said bitterly.
“Oh, cheer up, man! What’s two days to you, a youth whose primary asset in life is Time? If you look at it just right, I am more to be pitied than you. I shall be embarking only on a tawdry little affair; while you, if I do not misread the symptoms, are in the throes of love. Believe me, young man, you have no grounds for envy. You will be left with fertile memories; I shall be left with only a strong urge to bathe.”
“Yes, but—”
“Perhaps I should put it this way: I intend to leave tomorrow morning, and there’s no point in our debating the matter.”
Lacking alternative, and with a minimal display of good graces, I agreed to attend to the clinic and to remain in the village until his return. But I extracted his promise to pass by Etcheverria on his way and explain why I would not be able to take tea with them that day, or attend the fкte d’Alos the next.
“A commission I shall undertake with pleasure. But a sense of fair play requires me to warn you that, once your young woman casts her eyes on my virile features, untrammelled by beauty or even conventional regularity, I cannot be held accountable for her heart. You’re sure you won’t have a little glass?”
* * *
The following day I was harnessed to the routine of the clinic, including a visit to the watering station in Doctor Gros’s stead. His tourist/patients were not delighted to find the crusty old doctor with whom they could share their giggling little double entendres replaced by a young man who appeared crisp and unsympathetic to their imagined maladies.
Late that afternoon the featureless routine was broken by the dramatic arrival of a Basque peasant lad who had caught his sleeve in a farm machine. I was able to staunch the bleeding and save the arm, and I received the tearful gratitude of the panicked mother and even a reluctant handshake from the taciturn father, who, having watched the operation in grim and desperate silence until he was sure the boy was out of danger, then manifest his love and relief by being furious with the lad for risking so precious a life. Because the mother had no French, I had spoken to them in Basque, and I could sense their discomfort at the realization that this doctor was one of them. Like most proud and oppressed minorities, the Basque have developed a defensive armour of racial superiority requiring them to assert that the Basques are better farmers, dancers, lovemakers, fighters, and predictors of weather than the French or Spanish majorities amongst whom they live. But, at the same time, when it comes to important matters like lawsuits or illness, they cannot avoid a deep feeling that it would be wiser to have their affairs and lives in the hands of a cultured outlander. The most brutalizing effect of prejudice is that the victims come to believe, at a deep and unconfessed level, the stereotypes established by the oppressor. For this reason, the father of the injured boy was all the more relieved when it became clear that his son’s life was to be spared and his usefulness around the farm undiminished. He went so far as to offer me a glass of Izarra, although his peasant wariness made him ask how much I intended to steal from him for this slight medical attention.
As I was washing up after they left, I reflected on how Doctor Gros’s insistence that I remain in Salies had been vindicated, for the lad had been rushed into the clinic a little after four o’clock, when I might have been taking a cup of tea on the terrace of Etcheverria. It also occurred to me that, for the first time since I looked up from under my straw boater and saw Katya approaching across the park green, I had passed an hour without the image of her on my inner eye. It was my first experience of the emotional anodyne to be found in working at a calling, rather than a profession—that daily narcotic that was to numb the slow passage of the years following the summer of Katya.
After the clinic closed for the night, the hours dragged by ponderously while, before I had met Katya, I had easily filled my time with scribbling verses, reading novels, and daydreaming about the excitements and challenges of my future. To relieve the monotony, I left my boardinghouse and crossed the square to one of the cafйs. But the conversation at the tables and up and down the zinc bar centered on the impending war with Germany: warnings from Paris; threats from Berlin; saber-rattling from beleaguered, confused Austria; scabbard-rattling from vast, hollow Russia. Some of the older men remembered the wounded gloire of the 1870 War, and spoke of humiliating Germany, of recovering Alsace, of “France to the Rhine!” I found this martial frenzy and drunken jingoism disgusting… and frightening. So I returned to the solitude of my room.
I have before me the notes I scribbled in my journal that night, and the parenthetical comments on those notes added several years later, after the war was over and I was established as the village doctor of Alos. I share them with you uncorrected, revealing the youthful pedantry of Greek-letter rubrics and my romantic pseudo-philosophic assumptions, and also sharing with you the bitter postwar disenchantment of the parenthetical notes.
Alpha: This horrid war will never materialize! (It did.)
Beta: If war does come, it will be brief because human flesh and emotions cannot withstand modern machines of death and mutilation. (It was not brief. The flesh did withstand the death and mutilation. The emotions did not.)
Gamma: If I am called to the colors, I shall flee to Switzerland in protest against this madness. (I did not. I no longer cared.)
Delta: Even in the brutality of war, a man of poetry, a man of inner resources, should be able to fight without becoming an animal, to rise above the slaughter and maintain his spiritual dignity. (Bullshit.)
* * *
After an uneventful morning, I was taking the plat du jour luncheon at my usual cafй under the arcade, insensitive to the sparkling beauty of the weather, my thoughts concentrated on Katya and Etcheverria.
“Are you receiving guests?”
“What?” I was startled out of my reverie. “I beg your— Katya? What a surprise. Oh… and Paul.”
“I take it you recommend this restaurant?” Paul asked, looking around with distaste.
I rose and gestured them to join me, which Katya did with a warm smile. But Paul remained standing. “I have a few errands to attend to. But when I return I should be delighted to accept… oh, anything that can’t be ruined by the chef. A glass of water, perhaps? We’ve been trudging along that dusty road for hours… perhaps for weeks. I no longer recall. The torture of it has blurred my memory.”
“Yes,” Katya said, “I convinced Paul to walk with me. It’s a gorgeous day, and the fresh air and exercise are good for him.”
“I wonder why everything that is good for one is either dull or painful? Why is everything that is repulsive to the flesh assumed to be good for the character?”
“Oh, rubbish! It was good for you. For my part, I am ravenous. That looks good, Jean-Marc. Will you order some for me?”
“With pleasure.” I signaled the waiter.
“I should warn you,” Paul said, “that she has the gastronomic indiscretion of a Pygmy. I wonder we have any furniture left in the house.”
“Oh, really, Paul!”
“Don’t ‘oh, really’ me. I’ve seen you glance covetously at the ottoman when you’re feeling peckish. Don’t try to deny it. Do you know what she did on the way here, Jean-Marc? With total disregard of my social embarrassment, she pushed her way through a hedge and snatched an apple from a tree—a vulgar apple from a living tree! And she ate it. Fell upon the wretched vegetable and manducated it. Chomp, grind, munch, gnash… and all that was left was a disgusting core.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “she has an appetite for life that ought not to be denied expression.” A slight movement of his eyebrows told me that he had read my meaning.
“It was delicious, actually,” Katya said. “A little green and tart, but delicious.”
“Then what did she do?” Paul asked, all mock outrage. “In emulation of perfidious Eve, she offered to fetch one for me. For me! Can you picture Paul Etienne Jean-Marie de Treville trudging along the road, pushing pome fruits into his mouth? Then for the next two or three hundred kilometers she babbled on about the glories of nature, cooing over garish weeds that choked the roadside—”
“Wildflowers,” Katya clarified.
“—and pretending that the damned things had names (both Latin and vulgar) and that there was some unstipulated virtue in my learning them. As though I intended ever again to submit my body to the tortures of an overland trek! Now, I will concede that some of the names had a kind of ironic rightness… goatsbreath, frogsbane, stenchpoppy—”
“He’s making those up.”
“—but others were as stickily saccharine as her gushing enthusiasm. Sweetheart’s joy, love’s sigh, passion’s heart, lust’s elbow—”
“Didn’t you promise us that you had to run off to perform errands?” Katya asked.
“And indeed I have. I must haggle with the local merchants about the storage and shipment of our impedimenta. You two will have to suffer along without my company for a quarter of an hour. But I warn you, Montjean. Feed her quickly, or be prepared to stand guard over treasured family knickknacks, porcelain vases, umbrella racks, that sort of thing. Anyone who would eat an apple in its raw state, with the stench of tree all over it, would eat anything.” And with a wave of his hand he departed down the arcade.
Katya smiled after him.
“Your brother seems chipper enough,” I said, after the waiter had brought her plat du jour and departed.
“Hm-m. We had a delightful walk. He knows how it makes me laugh when he plays at being shocked and horrified by everything pertaining to nature.”
“Katya, I am so sorry that things came up to interfere with our plans. I know I’ve ruined your father’s hopes to attend the fкte d’Alos. You did get my message, I hope?”
“Yes, we did. And your Dr. Gros… what a charming man.”
“You found him charming?”
“Hm-m. Don’t you?”
“If I were asked to list a thousand words describing him, ‘charming’ would appear nowhere.”
“Why is that?”
“Because his philandering has cost me two days with you. Two precious days, when we have so few that—”
“—Don’t let’s talk about the time we shall not have together. It’s pointless and saddening. Let’s talk about the time we shall have. Our trip to the fкte d’Alos is not ruined. We’ve simply decided to delay it until tomorrow. And I’ve heard that the last day of a fкte is the most exciting anyway.”
“Well… it’s the least inhibited. It’s quite common for birth dates in Basque villages to fall nine months after the last day of the fкte, with hasty marriages sandwiched in between.”
“Speaking of sandwiches, I’ve planned out the picnic we’ll have on our way. We’ll eat out in the fields—perhaps in an orchard.”
“I’m sure Paul is bursting with anticipation.”
“Oh, he’ll grouse and complain to amuse us, but I don’t care how he feels about it. We must take advantage of this magnificent weather. As soon as the idea occurred to me, I had to come into Salies to tell you. When I asked Paul if I might, he was hesitant, but then he offered to accompany me. I know you don’t like him, but he’s always been very kind to me. And, do you know what? I really think he likes you… in his own reluctant way. Does that surprise you?”
“It does indeed. He’s uniquely skillful at concealing his affection.”
“Oh, Paul’s like that.” She smiled at me, and my heart expanded in my chest.
“I thought about you constantly all through yesterday, Katya.”
“Constantly? Your attention wasn’t on your work for even a single second?”
“Well, almost constantly, then.”
“Relatively constantly?”
“Almost relatively constantly, at least.”
“I’m pleased. I thought about you, too. Not quite constantly, or even relatively constantly, but often… and with pleasure. I sat for hours down in my library at the bottom of the garden, reading a book… well, not exactly reading it. More reading at it. Staring through the words and letting my mind wander. The garden was so lovely… tangled, overgrown… the warmth of the sun on my face… the somnolent hum of insects. It was so peaceful.”
“And your little ghost? Was she peaceful too?”
She set her fork down and looked at me. “How on earth did you know that?”
“Know what?”
“That the young girl was… not happy, exactly… peaceful. Several times I felt her presence. Like a melody sung just out of hearing. But there wasn’t the sweet sadness that I used to feel flowing from her. There was a kind of… of muted joy. But how could you have known about that?”
“I didn’t really.”
“What are you trying to convince us you didn’t do?” Paul asked, appearing from behind the arcades and joining us at the table. “Don’t believe him, Katya. I am sure he did it. It’s just like him to do that sort of thing—whatever it was. Tell me, do you think the waiter might be prompted to give me a glass of the fluid that passes locally for wine?”
I beckoned the waiter and gestured for the wine. “Would you like some coffee, Katya?”
“Yes, please. No, on second thought, I must go around to the shops. There are a few things I want to get for tomorrow’s picnic.” She rose. “No, don’t get up. Thank you for the luncheon, Jean-Marc. That coat rack was particularly delicious.”
Paul and I smiled her away; then I turned to him. “Katya tells me she finally gave in to your begging and arranged a picnic for tomorrow.”
“I can hardly wait. Crouching uncomfortably on the ground, nibbling at dry sandwiches, dust blowing into the food, to say nothing of the small creatures that will attend as uninvited guests. In my view, eating out of doors is like fornicating on a busy boulevard. The basic biological impulses should be satisfied in private—or at least in company of a few understanding friends.”
The waiter brought his wine. “Ah,” he said, draining the glass then shuddering with a grimace. “It’s sometimes difficult to recall that, with the benefit of a few incantations, this swill can become the blood of Christ.”
“Katya tells me we shall all be going to the fкte d’Alos after all.”
“Katya tells you everything, it would seem. Yes, we shall be going. Father is looking forward to it with the anticipation of a child.”
I was silent for a moment. “Paul,” I began—
“—There’s something in your tone that suggests you’re preparing to give me advice… the only thing genuinely more blessed to give than receive.”
“Not advice, exactly. I was thinking about your father.”
“And?”
“The other evening, in his study, he mentioned that he didn’t think he could stand another move… all his books and papers in chaos… nothing where he could find it.”
“It’s good of you to concern yourself so with my affairs. But you will forgive me if I find something self-serving in your desire to see my family remain here, won’t you?”
“I presume you haven’t told your father about your plans yet.”
“As it happens, you’re mistaken—a condition I suppose you’ve become used to after all your years of blundering about in other people’s affairs. In fact, I told Father about the move last night.”
“And how did he take it?”
“Not well, of course. However, he understood the necessity and trusted my judgment. But then, he is equipped with some knowledge of our circumstances and does not, like you, make evaluations from the basis of abysmal ignorance. I do hope that doesn’t sound harsh or critical. Listen here, Montjean. Let’s you and I make a pact. Let’s do what we can to make tomorrow a fine and amusing day for Katya and Papa. I shall do my part. I shall participate in the press and sweat of a rural festival, a smile of delight frozen to my face. I shall force cold food into my mouth while sitting on dirt. Greater love hath no man for his sister. Ah… and here comes the woman in question bearing in her basket, I fear, all kinds of nasty comestibles for alfresco gorging… lots of juicy things designed to drip onto clothing.” He rose. “May we expect you sometime midmorning?”
He joined Katya in the middle of the square, and they left towards Etcheverria, after she waved to me and mouthed, “Until tomorrow.”
I sat for a time, looking across the square dazzling with sunlight. I could not quite articulate the ambivalence of my feelings, because to do so required confessing to a petty resentment of Katya’s ability to face our forthcoming separation with so much more equanimity than I. To be sure, there was an element of courage in her attitude, of dealing gracefully with the inevitable. But where does strength leave off and callousness begin? What is the boundary between courage and indifference? And what of my own behavior? Had I not chatted urbanely with Paul, joking about picnics, when Katya’s happiness was at stake? Are we not all victims of social training, of “good form,” which requires us to face the greatest calamity with a certain grace and style? We would rather be destroyed than embarrassed.
And I thought of the forthcoming war that had been the talk of the cafй the past night. Would the young men called to arms laugh and joke and exchange hearty platitudes in imitation of popular fiction, while they waited to be mutilated by the stupidity and arrogance of aged politicians? Could the youth of France be so gullible?