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The dancers had emptied the ring at the first commotion, and Paul was standing in the center, his bodily attitude cockily relaxed, a slight smile on his lips. Before him on the stones lay one of the young men from the motorcar, shaking his head and pushing himself heavily up from the cobbles. The other was circling Paul in a tentative, feline way, a wine bottle clutched in his fist. Paul turned slowly to keep his face to him, all the while smiling his taunting smile. There was a movement among the young Basque men near me, and I heard the hiss of belts coming off and being spun in the air to wrap them around the fists in the Basque way, with twenty or so centimeters of strap and buckle left free as flails. There was more excitement than aggression in their attitude, and I knew they were anticipating the obligatory bagarre without which any fкte would be accounted a hollow event.
“It’s my friend!” I shouted in Basque. “The fight is a matter of honor!”
There was an uncertain grumble, so I added, “What are these outlanders to us? Let them settle it in their own way! Let them amuse us by battering one another!” I had struck the right note to persuade the xenophobic Basques. With a ripple of agreement, the wrapped fists were lowered.
Paul had kept himself facing the man with the bottle until he had his back to the one rising from the ground. The bottle-fighter lunged forward, and Paul kicked him in the ribs with the balletic grace of a champion kick-boxer. No sooner had the Parisian grunted and dropped his arm to cover the bruised ribs than Paul spun to face the one rising from the cobbles. The lad was vulnerable to a damaging kick in the face, but Paul did not take advantage of his dazed condition. Instead, he put his foot against his shoulder and thrust out with enough strength to send the young man rolling over the stones. Instantly Paul turned and kicked the bottle out of the other’s hand, all the time with his arms hanging lightly at his sides in a relaxed attitude that almost gave the impression that his hands were in his pockets. There was a shriek to the right of us, and I turned to see the Parisian girl Paul had been flirting with bury her face in the shoulder of one of her friends, making sure everyone knew the fight was over her.
Katya’s fingers were rigid on my arm, but I said to her, “Don’t worry. Paul doesn’t need any help. He’s fine.”
Moving forward with little sliding steps like an advancing fencer, Paul delivered light blows with one foot then the other to each side of the bottle-fighter’s head, and the young man staggered back, more confused and bewildered than hurt, unable to get out of reach. It was obvious that Paul was more intent upon humiliating his opponents than doing them any real harm. Baffled, stung, his greater size and strength neutralized, the Parisian put his head down and charged at Paul with a roar. Paul sidestepped gracefully and gave the lad a loud slap on his buttocks that delighted the onlookers.
Evidently the first kick delivered to the man whom Katya and I arrived to discover already on the ground had been a vigorous one, for he was quite out of the combat. He rose groggily and staggered away into the ring of spectators where he was greeted with hoots and jeers.
The other now advanced on Paul charily, his big fists up before his face in the stance of a conventional boxer.
“Do you remember me?” Paul asked, gliding back to keep distance from him. “I’m the one you forced off the road with your silly motorcar.”
The Parisian lunged forward and struck out, but Paul slapped the fist away with one foot then, with a lightning change-step, tapped the fellow on the side of the face with the other toe hard enough to make his teeth click.
“I have now offered you a little lesson in good manners,” Paul said. “And I’m willing to consider the lesson given and taken, if you are.”
But the Parisian continued to advance, angry and frustrated with not being able to touch Paul with a blow.
“I cannot afford to toy with you forever, son,” Paul warned, giving him a quick kick to the stomach that was just strong enough to make him grunt. “You’re a large beast, and it wouldn’t do for you to get in a lucky blow. Shall we call the contest over?”
I felt that the young man would willingly have abandoned the hopeless struggle, were it not for the young ladies before whom he could not allow himself to be humiliated. There was only one humane thing for Paul to do.
And he did that in the next few seconds. With a shout of desperation, the young man rushed at Paul, his arms flailing. He caught hold of Paul’s sleeve and tore his jacket at the shoulder. Paul tugged away and delivered a quick kick to the stomach that doubled the man up with a snort; then he spun and kicked with all his force to the side of the head. The young man rolled over the cobbles and lay unmoving.
As Paul strolled away with studied nonchalance, more concerned over his torn sleeve than anything else, there was a general mutter of praise and approval from the onlookers, and there were exuberant cris basques from adolescent boys who had climbed up onto second-storey balconies to get a better view of the entertainment. The three Parisian girls rushed into the square to play their Nightingale roles over their fallen swain, who was now sitting dazed on the stones, and whose greatest desire was to disappear from the scene of his embarrassment. I drew Katya along with me and we overtook Paul near one of the buvettes.
“May I offer you a glass?” I asked.
Paul turned to us, his eyes shining with excitement. “By all means, Montjean. It’s thirsty work, this teaching manners to young boors.”
“And you loved it!” Katya reproved sternly. “Men never grow up entirely!” But her anxiety over Paul’s welfare was mixed with a hint of pride.
“Just look at my jacket, will you! I wonder if my contribution to the education of that bourgeois was worth it. Ah, thank you, Montjean.” He accepted the glass I brought him and drained it. “Now, that is ghastly stuff. Still, I suppose there’s a subtle economy in being able to use the same substance for both wine and sheep dip. Nevertheless, I’ll accept another glass, if you’re in a generous mood.”
“May I have one as well?” Katya asked.
“Why yes, of course.” It had not occurred to me to offer her a glass of the coarse local wine, but I supposed she felt the need for it after the suspense and tension of Paul’s encounter.
Because it was for the hero of their recent entertainment, the man who slopped wine into glasses at the buvette refused to accept pay for the three glasses, a rare and significant gesture for a Basque, with whom the virtue of frugality precedes cleanliness in its proximity to godliness.
We found space for ourselves on the worn stone steps of the church, where I spread my coat for Katya to sit upon, and we sipped our wine as we watched a group of boys on the square playing at kicking one another in imitation of the exploits they had just observed. The lad playing the role of Paul did so with extravagant pirouettes and much strutting about, while he held his face in a mask of stretched disdain that looked for all the world as though he were reacting to a barnyard stench. Each time this lad kicked out, a nearby boy did an awkward backwards flip and landed in a comically distorted heap on the ground.
“Did I really look like that?” Paul asked, with an amused frown.
“The boy’s underplaying you a bit,” Katya taunted, “but he has captured the essence of your attitude.” Then she turned suddenly serious. “You frightened me to death, Paul. What if the one with the bottle had hit you?”
“I was frightened myself,” Paul said, rather surprising me with the admission. “There were two of them, and they were healthy-looking specimens. So I struck out rather too vigorously at first, meaning to immobilize at least one of them immediately.” He glanced at me. “A man who’s frightened and has his back to the wall can be very dangerous. He doesn’t dare to moderate his attack.”
I nodded. “Why did you play with the second one so long?”
“My dear fellow, it wasn’t a matter of punishing him. It was a matter of humiliating him. I know their type: second generation arrives merchants imitating the accents and behavior of their betters (people like me) but lacking the innate panache to pull it off. Paris is full of them. And humiliating them is a popular indoor sport with men of my class. So far as punishment goes, I had already accomplished that. I rearranged certain features of the motorcar they were so proud of.”
“Yes. We saw the effects of your repairs.”
“Hm-m. Well, I confess to having no technical gifts. But I left them all the bits, so they could have someone more skillful correct any little errors I may have made.”
“You devil!” Katya said, and again the reproval was mock. Then she put her hand on my arm. “Did you know that Jean-Marc spoke out and prevented your little display from becoming what we call a ‘bagarre basque.’ “
“What we call a ‘bagarre’?” Paul taunted. He turned to me. “Was that you shouting out in that comic imitation of a language?”
“It was.”
“Ah, I see. When I saw those belt buckles flashing out of the corner of my eye, I thought for a moment I was for it. I suppose it was a good thing for me that those young buffoons were also outlanders.”
“Indeed it was.”
Having taken advantage of Paul’s distraction to refresh themselves at one of the bars, the band now struck up a high-tempo Kax Karot, and soon there were twenty or more couples dancing and leaping in the square. Most of the candles in the paper lanterns had guttered out, but the dented moon high above filled the square with its pallid light.
Paul rose and offered his hand to Katya. “Are you willing to join your brother in this primitive hopping about?”
She stood and dropped a little curtsy. “We call it a Kax Karot.”
“Oh we do, do we? You will excuse us, Doctor?”
They joined the general swirl of dancers, where Paul’s strong legs, trained in kick-boxing, stood him in good stead when the challenge lines formed to leap against one another. As I watched them I was struck anew by how much they resembled one another, not only in appearance, but in energy and articulation, in idioms of body movement.
It occurred to me that this would be a good time to look in on Monsieur Treville, who might well have been seduced into drinking more than was his wont by his company of old Basque peasants. I found him sitting in the same bar, now much less crowded in result of a continuous drain of people from the fкte to their farms. A nearly full bottle of Izarra was on the table from which not one of the old men had stirred. Can one imagine a Basque leaving a place where the Izarra is free? I hoped that not too many bottles of that insidious liqueur had preceded this one. The flow of talk had reversed, and Monsieur Treville now held forth on some arcane topic that none of the Basque men seemed to be following very closely. But that did not diminish the energy of his monologue until he caught sight of me at the door and gestured for me to join them at the table, where he introduced me around. I was surprised that he remembered each of the men’s names and even pronounced them fairly accurately. Save for a convivial shine in his eyes, he seemed not much the worse for drink and therefore in no great danger of being bilked out of more Izarra than he chose to buy, so I felt free to return to Katya and Paul, but I could not leave without a full round of formal handshaking. One of the old men recognized my name and told me that he had known one of my uncles rather well, so I must have a little glass of Izarra with him (clearly, the bottle had become communal property, a gift from God). Seizing the opportunity for rounds of toasts, another of the peasants revealed that he had once shared a high mountain pasture with my mother’s cousin and therefore must insist that I have a glass with him as well.
I drank down my second glass then jokingly asked if any of them had owned a sheepdog bred from a bitch owned by my uncle’s cousin’s son, and therefore felt the need to offer a toast. The oldest of the men knew my meaning exactly, and his eyes glittered with conniving humor as he said, “No offense to your family, young man, but we must face the fact that your uncle’s cousin’s son’s dogs were not of the best bloodline; therefore toasting them with a round might be a greedy waste of Izarra.”
I grinned back at him and nodded, taking delight in the tortuous subtleties of the Basque mind. What I had really said was: Don’t take excessive advantage of this generous friend of mine. And what the old man had really said was: Who would do such a thing?
How can such a language be translated?
When I returned to the square I saw Katya dancing a slow passo with the young jai alai player she had danced with before. As they passed by, the young man smiled and nodded to me in a way that said he understood this woman to be mine and was not going to contest the point. I smiled and gestured with my thumb to my mouth, inviting him to take a glass with me later. He nodded again and they danced away. Perhaps it was the Izarra, but I felt closer to and fonder of my Basque heritage at that moment than I had for years, and I had a twinge of shame for having worked so hard to lose my accent and disavow my background to avoid ridicule at university. Of course, I could not have known that eventually I would return from the war to pass my entire life as that village’s doctor.
As I drifted around the rim of onlookers, I saw Paul dancing with an attractive Basque girl who was faintly familiar to me, but it didn’t dawn on me for several minutes that she was the one who had played the role of the Drowned Virgin. I had a momentary worry about Paul’s taking the girl who was considered the village belle, as I had no appetite for ending up back to back with Paul in a melee of whistling belt buckles. But he had the good sense to lead her back to a group of her friends after the dance, and to treat her with a distant and comically overdone politeness that earned him an invitation to join them in a round.
During the next hour, I danced several times with Katya; and once with somebody’s grandmother; and once with somebody’s spinster aunt. And Katya danced with an adolescent boy who had been pushed towards her, blushing and stammering, by his friends; and she danced with an old man somewhat asea with wine, who grinned and waved at all his friends to make sure they noticed his bold conquest; and once again with the young jai alai player after the three of us had taken a glass of wine together. Paul did not dance again, but he was taken on a triumphant txikiteo of the bars by a knot of young men who insisted that he must have some Basque blood in him, to be able to fight so well. When next I saw him he had lost his cravat somewhere.
After one last Kax Karot, the musicians descended from their platform, and the fкte was over, save for the early morning omelette the young men would share at a nearby farmhouse. Katya and I found Paul, and the three of us went to the bar where their father had been ensconced all evening long. Just as we entered, the old men began to sing “Agur Jaunak,” the final song of any Basque fкte, their strained falsetto voices trembling with emotion and age. I joined in the plaintive melody, surprised and a bit embarrassed to find tears standing in my eyes.
Monsieur Treville had not survived the Izarra quite as well as I had thought, as we discovered walking across the square towards the bridge. Twice he stumbled and complained about the uneven cobblestones that made it hard for a person to keep his balance.
“What did your cronies have to say about Paul’s exhibition?” Katya asked, putting her arm around her father as though in affection, but really to steady him.
“What exhibition was that?” Monsieur Treville asked with a confused frown.
“Never mind,” Paul said. And he pretended to stumble. “Damn these cobblestones!”
Just as we crossed the bridge there came a cri basque from the square behind us followed by shouts and sounds of scuffling.
“Ah,” I said. “I had begun to fear the fкte would have to do without one.”
“Without one what?” Monsieur Treville asked.
“Without its bagarre. It’s a time-honored tradition.”
Monsieur Treville stopped in his track. “A tradition? Let’s go back and join in!”
“Oh, let’s not, Papa,” Paul said. “We’ve had enough of rural customs and traditions for one night.”
“Oh, perhaps so… perhaps so.” Monsieur Treville’s voice was heavy with sudden fatigue.
But he regained his spirits as we drove away down the dirt road that seemed to glow in the moonlight. I had taken my turn at the reins, and he sat in back with Paul, regaling us with the curious and fascinating bits of folklore he had learned until, almost in midthought, he stopped speaking. I turned to discover that he had fallen asleep on his son’s shoulder. Paul smiled and shook his head as he adjusted his father’s coat to keep out the night air.
During the two hours of the slow ride back to Etcheverria no one spoke; the only sound was the clop of the horse’s hooves in the dust, and the rattle of the trap as it swayed over the uneven road like a small boat wending down a stream of moonlight bordered by dark silhouettes of river grasses. Katya did not rest against my shoulder, though I offered it. She seemed pleasantly alone and isolated in wisps of daydream and memory. Twice she softly hummed snatches of the melodies she had danced to, both times the tune fading away as some vagrant reverie carried her thoughts adrift.
It was not until I had turned into the poplar lane leading up to Etcheverria that Monsieur Treville awoke with a little start and asked where we were.
“We’re home, Papa,” Paul said.
“Home? Really? We’ve come home?” There was bewildered excitement in his voice, before he realized that “home” meant the house in the Basque country. “Oh, I see,” he said in a rather deflated tone.
I let them off at the door and drove around to the stable to unharness and attend to the horse. A quarter of an hour passed before I returned, by which time Monsieur Treville had gone up to his room, and Paul and Katya were sitting in the salon with only one lamp lit and no fire in the hearth.
“Papa wished you a good night,” Paul said. “And he asked me to thank you for bringing us to the fкte.”
“Yes,” Katya added, “I don’t remember when he enjoyed himself so much. It was good of you, Jean-Marc.” The words had the vacant sound of social rote, and she appeared worried and distant.
Paul rose. “Well, I think I shall go up myself.” He stifled a yawn. “I do hope the bad wine I’ve drunk will counteract any beneficial effects of all this vulgar exercise. Don’t keep her up too late, Montjean.” He laid his hand on Katya’s shoulder. “I’ve told Katya that you know all about Papa and his… problem. And I’ve asked her to listen to what you have to say before making up her mind whether she wants to go with us or stay.”
Katya’s eyes were lowered and her bodily attitude seemed heavy and burdened.
Paul held out his left hand to me. “I suppose I shan’t be seeing you again, Montjean. I would like to say that meeting you has been an undiluted pleasure, but you know me: helpless slave to the truth.” With a little wave he disappeared up the staircase.
That was the last time I saw Paul alive.
I turned to Katya, who continued to avert her eyes. All the energy and joy of life she had exhibited at the fкte seemed drained from her. After a moment of silence, I began, “Katya—”
“—It really was good of you to treat us to this day, Jean-Marc.” She spoke in a rush, as though to distract me from my purpose by a barrage of words. “Papa had such a good time, while only this morning his heart was heavy with the thought that he would have to move his books again and disturb the special chaos he thrives on. The picnic… the fкte… this has been a day to remember. I hope you don’t intend to spoil it all now.”
“Look at me, Katya.”
“I can’t… I…” I could see tears standing in her averted eyes.
I drew a sigh. “Shall we walk down to the summerhouse?”
“If you wish.” She rose, still avoiding my eyes, and went before me out through the terrace doors.
She sat in the broken wicker chair beneath the lattice of the summerhouse, and I leaned against the entrance arch. A cold moonlight slanted through the dense foliage, blotting the ground with patches of black and silver, and a night breeze was sibilant in the trees above us.
After a moment of silence, I began, “I want to talk about your father.”
She did not respond.
“I am sure you don’t really want to leave here… to leave me.”
She spoke in a quiet atonal voice. “Wanting has nothing to do with it. I have no choice.”
“That’s not true. You do have a choice, and you must make it. Perhaps Paul no longer has a choice. His appetite for life is slight anyway. But you, Katya… when I saw you dance… the way you looked when you walked back from the riverbank with your arms full of wildflowers… Katya, the joy of living is in every fiber of you!”
“I can’t leave my father! Paul and I… we’re responsible for Papa. We can never repay our debt to him.”
“That is nonsense. All children believe they’re eternally indebted to their parents, but that’s not true. If there is any debt, it’s the parent who should repay the child for bringing it into this world of pain and war and hatred, just for a moment’s gratification.”
“It’s different in our case. Papa loved our mother terribly—”
“Madly?”
She ignored this. “He was wholly devoted to her. She was his life, his happiness. She was a very beautiful woman, very delicate. Too delicate, really. Her body was slight and fragile… and we were twins. The birth was a difficult one. Either the mother could be saved, or the babies. So that Paul and I might live, Papa had to lose the thing he loved most… his world. How could we desert him now?”
I did not want to expose her to a painful truth, but everything was at stake. “Katya? I know about the young man in Paris.”
“Yes. Paul told me he had been forced to tell you about it.”
“ ‘Forced’ isn’t quite accurate, but let that pass. The fact is, I know what happened in Paris better than even you do. This won’t be pleasant to hear, but you must know the truth if you are to make an intelligent decision. Paul led you to believe that your father shot the young man by—”
“—You are going to tell me that the accident was not an accident, aren’t you,” she said calmly.
“You know?”
Her head still bowed, her eyes still on her folded hands, she said, “I’ve known from the beginning. I was standing outside the door to Father’s study when Paul talked to him that next morning. It isn’t nice to listen at doors, but I was desperate to know what to do, how to protect Father… not only from punishment, but from the realization of what he had done. When I heard Paul tell him that I had shot the young man, I was bewildered and terrified. He was lying, of course—I can tell when Paul is lying; there’s a certain hearty sincerity in his voice that is a sure giveaway. In fact, the only time he sounds sincere is when he’s lying. Then suddenly I understood what he was doing; he had thought of a way to make Father confess to his act without making him face the horrible truth of his insanity. Later that morning Paul came to me and we had a long talk. I expected him to confess the fiction he had used to protect Father. But instead, he told me that Father had shot Marcel by accident, mistaking him for an intruder. Once again, Paul spoke with that serious, sincere tone that signaled a lie. And once again, I understood what he was doing. He was trying to protect me from knowing that Father was mad.”
I pressed my fingertips against my forehead, trying to comprehend this tapestry of lies and half-truths. “And all this time Paul has believed that you accepted his story of the accidental shooting?”
“Yes.” For the first time, she looked into my eyes, a faint sad smile on her lips. “So you see, by pretending to believe Paul’s story, I am lying too, in a way. All three of us are lying, each to protect the others from the truth.”
“And you alone know that truth?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure you know the whole truth? Do you know why your father shot the young… this Marcel?”
“I believe so. I have considered it a great deal, and I believe I understand. There was the staggering shock of my mother’s death. There were the years of concealing his grief beneath a heavy schedule of study, of trying to insulate his pain with work. And all that time, the unexpressed grief festered within him. Then one night at an unguarded and vulnerable moment… perhaps he had been thinking about her, sitting in his study and remembering… perhaps weeping. He stepped into the garden for a breath of air… he saw his wife in the arms of another man… I look very much like my mother, you know. Yes, Jean-Marc, I think I know what happened.”
“Then you must realize that the feelings he has for you are morbid. You do realize that, don’t you?”
“They’re not feelings for me. They’re feelings for his wife.”
“They’re morbid all the same. And there is no reason in the world to believe he won’t break again, won’t kill another young man whose only crime is loving you and holding you in his arms.”
“Exactly! And that is why we must leave here, Jean-Marc! Don’t you see?”
I ran my fingers through my hair. “But you mustn’t leave! I mustn’t lose you! I love you, for God’s sake!” I stopped short at hearing myself say the words so violently. Then I repeated softly, “I love you, Katya.”
Her eyes searched my face with concern; then she gazed out over the moonlit garden as she seemed to ponder some inner puzzle. When she spoke, after a long silence, it was with a distant voice. “I am twenty-six years old, Jean-Marc. Twenty-six years old. My mother died when she was just twenty. It’s a very strange feeling to be older than your mother. Think of it. I am six years older than my…” Her voice trailed off into reverie.
“Katya? There’s something I must ask you. I believe I already know the answer, because a person in love is sensitive to the one he loves and can read all the little signs and hints. But you’ve never said it in so many words. Katya… do you love me?”
After a moment of silence, she said, “You know that I am very fond of—”
“—I am not speaking about fondness or liking or friendship. Do you love me?”
She smiled faintly and rather sadly. “My determined, passionate Basque.”
“Do you love me?” I insisted, my pulse quickening as an unforeseen doubt began to rise in me like a cold shadow.
She touched my cheek with her fingertips, then cupped it in her palm. Her soft eyes looked into mine with what I feared was pity. She lowered her gaze and withdrew her hand. “No, Jean-Marc,” she said softly. “I don’t love you.”
The earth seemed to drop away beneath me. For a second, I was numb. Then the hurt began to sting behind my eyes. I had to swallow to suppress the knot of tears in my throat.
She spoke almost in a whisper. “I won’t tell you how fond of you I am, Jean-Marc, because I know that would only add to your pain. But please believe me. I am very sorry that I don’t love you. I can’t explain why I don’t. I’ve daydreamed about loving you. I want to love you. I even feel I ought to. But…”
I turned away so she could not see my face. My voice was strained and thin when I spoke. “And the man in Paris… your Marcel… did you love him?”
She was silent for a long moment. “I was young and romantic enough to delight in the thought of being in love, but… no. No, I’ve come to the realization that I shall never love. Not everyone has that capacity, you know. So you see, even if it weren’t for Papa, I could not stay with you. I couldn’t…. Are you crying? Please don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying.” I turned my face even farther from her and struggled to make no sound as the tears hitched in my throat and streamed down my cheeks. “Please… don’t look at me. Give me a minute. I’ll be all right. Forgive me.”
She was sensitive enough not to come to me, not to console me, while I brought the first rush of pain and emptiness under control.
After several minutes I was able to breathe more evenly and the flow of tears stopped. “I’m sorry,” I said, wiping my eyes with my fingers. “These last few days have been hard. I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry about,” she said softly.
“There!” I scrubbed my cheeks with my palms and turned to her, smiling damply. “There we are! Childish breakdown completely under control. My goodness! You must not be feeling very well, young lady. You look all blurry. We are trained in medical school to recognize blurriness as a serious, but seldom fatal, symptom of… I can’t remember what of, just now.” The forced gaiety must have sounded as hollow and false as it was.
Her voice had a caressing quality like that of the soothing noises we make to a child who has fallen and scraped his knee. “You deserve happiness, Jean-Marc, and I know you will find it one day. You are so sensitive… so kind. And you’re very brave.”
“Brave? Yes… well. It’s a trick we Basques have, young lady. We conceal our courage behind tears. It fools our enemies into thinking we’re weak.”
“Dear, dear Jean-Marc.”
I sat on the steps of the summerhouse, my back to her, and looked up at the dark branches above us laced with a tracery of silver moonlight. She had just told me that she did not love me, and I believed her—my mind believed her. But in my soul and heart, I could not accept it, could not even comprehend it. I had never thought of love as something one person felt for another. I had always conceived of love as a state, a condition outside the two persons, a kind of shared shelter within which both could find comfort and confidence. So how could it be that I felt so total and intense a love, while she…?
Nor could I console myself with the possibility that she might one day come to love me. Young and romantic as I was, I could not view love as something one could grow into, a contract the items of which one could negotiate one by one. Either love was whole and absorbed you totally, or it was not love. It was something else. Something more reasonable and calm, perhaps; something quite nice in its own way… but something I did not want.
After a time, I drew a long breath and spoke to her, my voice calm, but thin and toneless. “All right. I accept that you don’t love me, Katya. But I love you. I don’t intend to burden you with my love, but I can’t deny it either. It exists. And because I love you, I cannot allow you to waste your life, running forever from fears and shadows.”
“There’s no point in trying to persuade me. I love my father… even as you say you love me.”
“Love him? Well, perhaps. But you don’t respect him.”
“That’s not true! How can you say that?”
“Do you really believe that if your father knew you were sacrificing your youth and future to protect him, he would allow it? You and Paul are making decisions on his behalf that he would never make himself. You’re treating him as though he were a mindless infant.”
“Jean-Marc, my father is…”—she had to press the word out—”…insane.”
“Yes, insane. But not irrational. He’s capable of love, of feeling, of making decisions for himself.”
Her voice hardened. “You’re not thinking of telling him the truth, are you?”
“I have considered it, yes. I’ve considered every means of saving you. But no, I don’t intend to tell him. It’s not my place to do that. It’s your place, Katya. Or Paul’s.”
“I never could. And if you did, I would hate you forever.”
I smiled bitterly. “I had hoped to hear you confess your love for me tonight. But instead, I’ve only discovered conditions under which you would hate me forever. I’m not doing very well, am I?”
She came down the steps and sat beside me, slipping her hand under my arm and laying her head against my shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Jean-Marc.”
I nodded and pressed her hand between my arm and side. Though the touch and warmth of her pleased me, it eroded my all-too-frangible barriers against the tears that began to sting and prick against the backs of my eyes. I compressed my lips and rose, stepping away to prevent her from seeing me cry.
But she came to me, taking me in her arms, pressing against me and rocking me gently, as though I were an injured child. I clung to her desperately, my cheeks against the side of her head so she could not look into my face. Her hair was soft and warm, and soon it was damp with my tears. I brushed her hair with my lips, then her ear, her neck, her throat… and my mouth found hers. I felt her body soften and blend into mine. Her pelvis pressed against me so hard I could feel the bones, and I pressed back, as though wanting to break the two layers of skin that separated our flesh. She squirmed against me; a little gasp and whimper caught in her throat as her fingers clutched at my back; she stiffened and held me with such force that her muscles trembled….
….Her body went slack in my arms; our kiss softened to a light touch of lips; then our mouths separated and I could see her eyes, moist and infinitely soft. Then confusion and fright grew in her eyes, and she pressed her hands against my chest and drew away, and all the warm places where we had touched together seemed cold. With nervous fingertips she brushed wisps of hair from her forehead, her glance anxious and averted.
“Oh, Jean-Marc,” she said breathlessly. “I’m sorry. That was terrible of me. It’s never happened to me before—that… feeling. I didn’t know! But… nothing has changed. This does not mean that I love you. And that’s why it was terrible of me to do this… to feel this. Please forgive me.”
“Katya…” I reached for her.
“No!” She stepped back, her eyes large with fright. Then she repeated more calmly. “No, Jean-Marc. No. Now I… I must go back to the house.”
“Please don’t leave me.”
“I must!”
“Katya, do you know that I promised Paul that I would never again try to see you after tonight?”
She lowered her eyes and nodded. “Yes. And I’m sure it’s best.” Her breathing was still shallow. “Yes, that is best. Now I must go.”
I yearned to say something that would make her stay. I wanted to take her into my arms and comfort again the cold places. But what was the use? What was the use?
I drew a long breath. “Well… good-bye, then, Katya.”
She didn’t look up at me. “Good-bye, Jean-Marc,” she said softly. And she turned and went up the path to Etcheverria.
I watched her go, dapples of pallid moonlight rippling over her white dress until she had disappeared among the ragged overgrowth.
I can’t say how long I sat in her wicker chair. Ten minutes? An hour? Impossible to know. My knees tight together, my eyes focused unseeing on the floor of the summerhouse, I felt infinitely alone, and I had a premonition that I would be alone forever. There was no bitterness in this realization, only a kind of calm hopelessness.
And even now, as I pen this description years later, my heart goes out to the lost and empty young man I picture sitting there. I no longer feel the pain. But I remember his… vividly.
Logic tells me that what I shall now relate could not have happened as I remember it. I cannot re-create the events and sensations objectively. All I can do is to describe what I recall to the limits of my skill, accepting that the memory retains only a distorted record of traumatic experiences.
I was sitting there—how long does not matter, for my distress was beyond time—until at last the floor of the summerhouse came back into focus and I found myself shivering with the late-night damp. I drew a long, shuddering sigh that stung my lungs. I had better return to Salies. Why not? What was to be gained by sitting there? I pushed myself out of the wicker chair numbly and started down the steps. I felt a shock, as though I had walked into a solid wall, and there was a blaze of pain in my right side. I think I remember a flash of red light, but I believe it was behind, not in front of, my eyes. I recall no sound, no explosion, but I knew—as one knows things in a nightmare—that I had been shot. The garden lurched to one side, and I was clutching at the doorframe of the summerhouse. My lips must have been pressed against the frame, because I remember the grit of flakes of paint in my mouth. Ice spread through my stomach. Ice in my legs. A tingling weakness down my spine. And the ground rushed up at me as I fell, not to the ground, but through it. Through it… and down, down, tumbling in an echoing chaos of blackness. I can feel the nausea as I write this, and my fingers weaken around the pen. Down and down. Splotches of dim light appeared below me and rushed upwards past me. And there was a sound, like a single bass note of an organ, droning in my ears. I realized with a dreadful calm that I was dying. I am dying. I was faintly surprised to be dying, but quite serene. I am dying. Don’t struggle. Don’t fight it. Let it come.
But no! The animal in me cried out. Live! Live!
I rushed towards another blotch of dim light, and I knew with a sureness beyond reason that this would be the last of the light and everything beneath would be blackness. The glow swelled as I yearned myself towards it. It smeared and swam, then came into focus. Moonlight. A tree of grass close before my eyes. A boot. The toe of a man’s boot. I reached out and grasped the boot to arrest my endless fall. But the boot was tugged from my hold. With all my strength, I looked up, and there, far above me, bulging and rippling like a reflection in water, was Monsieur Treville’s face.
“Please… please…” I muttered through a thick tongue.
His face registered horror, and he recoiled from me.
I heard his voice, hollow and distant. “Oh, my God! My God!”
The blackness was rising inside me again. I could feel its chill shadow swell from within. “Please?…”
And I fell back into the void. An endless blackness… no sound… no light… tumbling… floating…
… floating… towards something white… with lines in it… bars… squares… a window. A window that widened into a wall, all white.
The white walls of the clinic at Salies? What? The clinic?
“Well, well. Lazarus-like, he returns from, if not the dead exactly, at least the thoroughly damaged. Here, drink this down.” Doctor Gros held up my head and set a glass to my lips. “Bottoms up, as the cancan girls say.” The last swallow caught in my throat, making me cough, and the convulsion seared my right side with pain. “Nasty-tasting stuff, I know. But my patients wouldn’t think it efficacious if it were palatable. Something to do with the Christian assumption that pleasure is evil and pain redeeming, I shouldn’t wonder. No, no, don’t try to talk. You’ve lost a lot of blood, and you’ve undergone a general somatic shock. But no vital organ was hit. You’ll live to a ripe old age—not that the medical profession has much cause to rejoice at that prospect.”
“What… what happened to… where?… where?…” I couldn’t think clearly.
“You really should try to polish up your skills as a conversationalist, Montjean. Babbling is for politicians and priests. But I’d rather you didn’t talk for a while. I’ll explain a bit to set your mind at rest. Young Treville brought you here in their cariole. He said something about an accident while he was showing you his target pistols. Considering what we know of the history of that family, I assume that was a lie. Naturally, I considered contacting the gendarmerie, but in view of your relations with the family, I thought I’d better wait until you regained consciousness. And you certainly took your time about that. It’s early morning. I’ve been sitting up with you all night. You’ll doubtless have a relapse when you see my bill. Well? Is it a matter for the gendarmerie?”
I shook my head weakly.
“Hm-m-m. I don’t know how wise that is. But I’m willing to concede that it’s your affair. I’ve been pondering this most of the night—nothing much else to occupy my mind, you understand. I assume it was the old man who shot you?”
“I don’t… I couldn’t see.”
“Well, it stands to reason, doesn’t it? After all, he has earned a reputation for that sort of social excess.”
I resented his trivially joking tone, but I was too limp and empty to admonish him.
“It couldn’t have been the brother who shot you. If he is the expert shot he’s reputed to be, you would be out of your misery—administering to the medical needs of the Heavenly Host, whatever those needs might be. Palliatives for boredom, probably. Or restoratives after the shock of meeting up with friends and family you’d thought you were finally rid of forever.”
I turned my head to the window. “It’s morning?”
“Yes. You’ve been unconscious all night. I stood at the window and watched dawn come—a thing I haven’t done in years, and one I hope I shall be able to avoid in the future. It threatens to be another beautiful day, for all the good that does you.”
“Please… please help me get up.”
“Don’t be stupid! You know, something just occurred to me. I wonder just how good a shot the Treville boy would be, considering that he would have to shoot with his left hand. Something to ponder, eh? Food for thought.”
“Dr. Gros? I must go to Etcheverria. Katya…”
“Listen to me, son. Your wound is still fresh. The bullet just clipped your side. You’re luckier than you deserve. You’ve benefited from God’s peculiar affection for fools, drunks, and lovers. But you’ve lost a lot of blood.”
“I must go!”
“Don’t be an ass, Montjean. That was laudanum I gave you just now. In a few minutes you’ll be unconscious and out of harm’s way. There’s no point in fighting it.”
I could already feel a velvet numbness rising in my brain. Although I knew it was futile, I could not help struggling against it. Katya needed me. When the opiate finally overwhelmed me, I went under in a nauseating turmoil of resistance and terror.
When I emerged again into consciousness, I was alone in the room, bathed in sweat and so weak that it took concentrated effort to lift my head and look towards the window. From the quality of the light I knew it was midafternoon. With trembling effort, I sat up and gingerly slipped my legs over the side of the bed. A wave of giddiness passed off, leaving me with a throbbing headache. I tugged up my nightdress and pulled off the plaster to examine my wound. It was tender and raw, and two ugly black threads merged with the redness where Doctor Gros had stitched it closed, but the wound was quite superficial and there was no bleeding. I redressed it; then I ventured to stand beside the bed. There was dizziness and a swim of pain, but I could stay on my feet. My clothes were hanging on a peg on the far wall, and I got dressed, moving cautiously, leaning against the wall each time a wave of light-headedness overcame me. My clothes were soiled, and the shirt was stiff with blood on the right, but I did not dare return to my boardinghouse for a change lest Doctor Gros discover my absence and make a commotion. Slipping unnoticed out the back door, I made my way to the stable where I found the boy drowsing on a pile of loose hay. He harnessed up the mare for me, and soon I was out of Salies and on the road to Etcheverria.
“It’s my friend!” I shouted in Basque. “The fight is a matter of honor!”
There was an uncertain grumble, so I added, “What are these outlanders to us? Let them settle it in their own way! Let them amuse us by battering one another!” I had struck the right note to persuade the xenophobic Basques. With a ripple of agreement, the wrapped fists were lowered.
Paul had kept himself facing the man with the bottle until he had his back to the one rising from the ground. The bottle-fighter lunged forward, and Paul kicked him in the ribs with the balletic grace of a champion kick-boxer. No sooner had the Parisian grunted and dropped his arm to cover the bruised ribs than Paul spun to face the one rising from the cobbles. The lad was vulnerable to a damaging kick in the face, but Paul did not take advantage of his dazed condition. Instead, he put his foot against his shoulder and thrust out with enough strength to send the young man rolling over the stones. Instantly Paul turned and kicked the bottle out of the other’s hand, all the time with his arms hanging lightly at his sides in a relaxed attitude that almost gave the impression that his hands were in his pockets. There was a shriek to the right of us, and I turned to see the Parisian girl Paul had been flirting with bury her face in the shoulder of one of her friends, making sure everyone knew the fight was over her.
Katya’s fingers were rigid on my arm, but I said to her, “Don’t worry. Paul doesn’t need any help. He’s fine.”
Moving forward with little sliding steps like an advancing fencer, Paul delivered light blows with one foot then the other to each side of the bottle-fighter’s head, and the young man staggered back, more confused and bewildered than hurt, unable to get out of reach. It was obvious that Paul was more intent upon humiliating his opponents than doing them any real harm. Baffled, stung, his greater size and strength neutralized, the Parisian put his head down and charged at Paul with a roar. Paul sidestepped gracefully and gave the lad a loud slap on his buttocks that delighted the onlookers.
Evidently the first kick delivered to the man whom Katya and I arrived to discover already on the ground had been a vigorous one, for he was quite out of the combat. He rose groggily and staggered away into the ring of spectators where he was greeted with hoots and jeers.
The other now advanced on Paul charily, his big fists up before his face in the stance of a conventional boxer.
“Do you remember me?” Paul asked, gliding back to keep distance from him. “I’m the one you forced off the road with your silly motorcar.”
The Parisian lunged forward and struck out, but Paul slapped the fist away with one foot then, with a lightning change-step, tapped the fellow on the side of the face with the other toe hard enough to make his teeth click.
“I have now offered you a little lesson in good manners,” Paul said. “And I’m willing to consider the lesson given and taken, if you are.”
But the Parisian continued to advance, angry and frustrated with not being able to touch Paul with a blow.
“I cannot afford to toy with you forever, son,” Paul warned, giving him a quick kick to the stomach that was just strong enough to make him grunt. “You’re a large beast, and it wouldn’t do for you to get in a lucky blow. Shall we call the contest over?”
I felt that the young man would willingly have abandoned the hopeless struggle, were it not for the young ladies before whom he could not allow himself to be humiliated. There was only one humane thing for Paul to do.
And he did that in the next few seconds. With a shout of desperation, the young man rushed at Paul, his arms flailing. He caught hold of Paul’s sleeve and tore his jacket at the shoulder. Paul tugged away and delivered a quick kick to the stomach that doubled the man up with a snort; then he spun and kicked with all his force to the side of the head. The young man rolled over the cobbles and lay unmoving.
As Paul strolled away with studied nonchalance, more concerned over his torn sleeve than anything else, there was a general mutter of praise and approval from the onlookers, and there were exuberant cris basques from adolescent boys who had climbed up onto second-storey balconies to get a better view of the entertainment. The three Parisian girls rushed into the square to play their Nightingale roles over their fallen swain, who was now sitting dazed on the stones, and whose greatest desire was to disappear from the scene of his embarrassment. I drew Katya along with me and we overtook Paul near one of the buvettes.
“May I offer you a glass?” I asked.
Paul turned to us, his eyes shining with excitement. “By all means, Montjean. It’s thirsty work, this teaching manners to young boors.”
“And you loved it!” Katya reproved sternly. “Men never grow up entirely!” But her anxiety over Paul’s welfare was mixed with a hint of pride.
“Just look at my jacket, will you! I wonder if my contribution to the education of that bourgeois was worth it. Ah, thank you, Montjean.” He accepted the glass I brought him and drained it. “Now, that is ghastly stuff. Still, I suppose there’s a subtle economy in being able to use the same substance for both wine and sheep dip. Nevertheless, I’ll accept another glass, if you’re in a generous mood.”
“May I have one as well?” Katya asked.
“Why yes, of course.” It had not occurred to me to offer her a glass of the coarse local wine, but I supposed she felt the need for it after the suspense and tension of Paul’s encounter.
Because it was for the hero of their recent entertainment, the man who slopped wine into glasses at the buvette refused to accept pay for the three glasses, a rare and significant gesture for a Basque, with whom the virtue of frugality precedes cleanliness in its proximity to godliness.
We found space for ourselves on the worn stone steps of the church, where I spread my coat for Katya to sit upon, and we sipped our wine as we watched a group of boys on the square playing at kicking one another in imitation of the exploits they had just observed. The lad playing the role of Paul did so with extravagant pirouettes and much strutting about, while he held his face in a mask of stretched disdain that looked for all the world as though he were reacting to a barnyard stench. Each time this lad kicked out, a nearby boy did an awkward backwards flip and landed in a comically distorted heap on the ground.
“Did I really look like that?” Paul asked, with an amused frown.
“The boy’s underplaying you a bit,” Katya taunted, “but he has captured the essence of your attitude.” Then she turned suddenly serious. “You frightened me to death, Paul. What if the one with the bottle had hit you?”
“I was frightened myself,” Paul said, rather surprising me with the admission. “There were two of them, and they were healthy-looking specimens. So I struck out rather too vigorously at first, meaning to immobilize at least one of them immediately.” He glanced at me. “A man who’s frightened and has his back to the wall can be very dangerous. He doesn’t dare to moderate his attack.”
I nodded. “Why did you play with the second one so long?”
“My dear fellow, it wasn’t a matter of punishing him. It was a matter of humiliating him. I know their type: second generation arrives merchants imitating the accents and behavior of their betters (people like me) but lacking the innate panache to pull it off. Paris is full of them. And humiliating them is a popular indoor sport with men of my class. So far as punishment goes, I had already accomplished that. I rearranged certain features of the motorcar they were so proud of.”
“Yes. We saw the effects of your repairs.”
“Hm-m. Well, I confess to having no technical gifts. But I left them all the bits, so they could have someone more skillful correct any little errors I may have made.”
“You devil!” Katya said, and again the reproval was mock. Then she put her hand on my arm. “Did you know that Jean-Marc spoke out and prevented your little display from becoming what we call a ‘bagarre basque.’ “
“What we call a ‘bagarre’?” Paul taunted. He turned to me. “Was that you shouting out in that comic imitation of a language?”
“It was.”
“Ah, I see. When I saw those belt buckles flashing out of the corner of my eye, I thought for a moment I was for it. I suppose it was a good thing for me that those young buffoons were also outlanders.”
“Indeed it was.”
Having taken advantage of Paul’s distraction to refresh themselves at one of the bars, the band now struck up a high-tempo Kax Karot, and soon there were twenty or more couples dancing and leaping in the square. Most of the candles in the paper lanterns had guttered out, but the dented moon high above filled the square with its pallid light.
Paul rose and offered his hand to Katya. “Are you willing to join your brother in this primitive hopping about?”
She stood and dropped a little curtsy. “We call it a Kax Karot.”
“Oh we do, do we? You will excuse us, Doctor?”
They joined the general swirl of dancers, where Paul’s strong legs, trained in kick-boxing, stood him in good stead when the challenge lines formed to leap against one another. As I watched them I was struck anew by how much they resembled one another, not only in appearance, but in energy and articulation, in idioms of body movement.
It occurred to me that this would be a good time to look in on Monsieur Treville, who might well have been seduced into drinking more than was his wont by his company of old Basque peasants. I found him sitting in the same bar, now much less crowded in result of a continuous drain of people from the fкte to their farms. A nearly full bottle of Izarra was on the table from which not one of the old men had stirred. Can one imagine a Basque leaving a place where the Izarra is free? I hoped that not too many bottles of that insidious liqueur had preceded this one. The flow of talk had reversed, and Monsieur Treville now held forth on some arcane topic that none of the Basque men seemed to be following very closely. But that did not diminish the energy of his monologue until he caught sight of me at the door and gestured for me to join them at the table, where he introduced me around. I was surprised that he remembered each of the men’s names and even pronounced them fairly accurately. Save for a convivial shine in his eyes, he seemed not much the worse for drink and therefore in no great danger of being bilked out of more Izarra than he chose to buy, so I felt free to return to Katya and Paul, but I could not leave without a full round of formal handshaking. One of the old men recognized my name and told me that he had known one of my uncles rather well, so I must have a little glass of Izarra with him (clearly, the bottle had become communal property, a gift from God). Seizing the opportunity for rounds of toasts, another of the peasants revealed that he had once shared a high mountain pasture with my mother’s cousin and therefore must insist that I have a glass with him as well.
I drank down my second glass then jokingly asked if any of them had owned a sheepdog bred from a bitch owned by my uncle’s cousin’s son, and therefore felt the need to offer a toast. The oldest of the men knew my meaning exactly, and his eyes glittered with conniving humor as he said, “No offense to your family, young man, but we must face the fact that your uncle’s cousin’s son’s dogs were not of the best bloodline; therefore toasting them with a round might be a greedy waste of Izarra.”
I grinned back at him and nodded, taking delight in the tortuous subtleties of the Basque mind. What I had really said was: Don’t take excessive advantage of this generous friend of mine. And what the old man had really said was: Who would do such a thing?
How can such a language be translated?
When I returned to the square I saw Katya dancing a slow passo with the young jai alai player she had danced with before. As they passed by, the young man smiled and nodded to me in a way that said he understood this woman to be mine and was not going to contest the point. I smiled and gestured with my thumb to my mouth, inviting him to take a glass with me later. He nodded again and they danced away. Perhaps it was the Izarra, but I felt closer to and fonder of my Basque heritage at that moment than I had for years, and I had a twinge of shame for having worked so hard to lose my accent and disavow my background to avoid ridicule at university. Of course, I could not have known that eventually I would return from the war to pass my entire life as that village’s doctor.
As I drifted around the rim of onlookers, I saw Paul dancing with an attractive Basque girl who was faintly familiar to me, but it didn’t dawn on me for several minutes that she was the one who had played the role of the Drowned Virgin. I had a momentary worry about Paul’s taking the girl who was considered the village belle, as I had no appetite for ending up back to back with Paul in a melee of whistling belt buckles. But he had the good sense to lead her back to a group of her friends after the dance, and to treat her with a distant and comically overdone politeness that earned him an invitation to join them in a round.
During the next hour, I danced several times with Katya; and once with somebody’s grandmother; and once with somebody’s spinster aunt. And Katya danced with an adolescent boy who had been pushed towards her, blushing and stammering, by his friends; and she danced with an old man somewhat asea with wine, who grinned and waved at all his friends to make sure they noticed his bold conquest; and once again with the young jai alai player after the three of us had taken a glass of wine together. Paul did not dance again, but he was taken on a triumphant txikiteo of the bars by a knot of young men who insisted that he must have some Basque blood in him, to be able to fight so well. When next I saw him he had lost his cravat somewhere.
After one last Kax Karot, the musicians descended from their platform, and the fкte was over, save for the early morning omelette the young men would share at a nearby farmhouse. Katya and I found Paul, and the three of us went to the bar where their father had been ensconced all evening long. Just as we entered, the old men began to sing “Agur Jaunak,” the final song of any Basque fкte, their strained falsetto voices trembling with emotion and age. I joined in the plaintive melody, surprised and a bit embarrassed to find tears standing in my eyes.
Monsieur Treville had not survived the Izarra quite as well as I had thought, as we discovered walking across the square towards the bridge. Twice he stumbled and complained about the uneven cobblestones that made it hard for a person to keep his balance.
“What did your cronies have to say about Paul’s exhibition?” Katya asked, putting her arm around her father as though in affection, but really to steady him.
“What exhibition was that?” Monsieur Treville asked with a confused frown.
“Never mind,” Paul said. And he pretended to stumble. “Damn these cobblestones!”
Just as we crossed the bridge there came a cri basque from the square behind us followed by shouts and sounds of scuffling.
“Ah,” I said. “I had begun to fear the fкte would have to do without one.”
“Without one what?” Monsieur Treville asked.
“Without its bagarre. It’s a time-honored tradition.”
Monsieur Treville stopped in his track. “A tradition? Let’s go back and join in!”
“Oh, let’s not, Papa,” Paul said. “We’ve had enough of rural customs and traditions for one night.”
“Oh, perhaps so… perhaps so.” Monsieur Treville’s voice was heavy with sudden fatigue.
But he regained his spirits as we drove away down the dirt road that seemed to glow in the moonlight. I had taken my turn at the reins, and he sat in back with Paul, regaling us with the curious and fascinating bits of folklore he had learned until, almost in midthought, he stopped speaking. I turned to discover that he had fallen asleep on his son’s shoulder. Paul smiled and shook his head as he adjusted his father’s coat to keep out the night air.
During the two hours of the slow ride back to Etcheverria no one spoke; the only sound was the clop of the horse’s hooves in the dust, and the rattle of the trap as it swayed over the uneven road like a small boat wending down a stream of moonlight bordered by dark silhouettes of river grasses. Katya did not rest against my shoulder, though I offered it. She seemed pleasantly alone and isolated in wisps of daydream and memory. Twice she softly hummed snatches of the melodies she had danced to, both times the tune fading away as some vagrant reverie carried her thoughts adrift.
It was not until I had turned into the poplar lane leading up to Etcheverria that Monsieur Treville awoke with a little start and asked where we were.
“We’re home, Papa,” Paul said.
“Home? Really? We’ve come home?” There was bewildered excitement in his voice, before he realized that “home” meant the house in the Basque country. “Oh, I see,” he said in a rather deflated tone.
I let them off at the door and drove around to the stable to unharness and attend to the horse. A quarter of an hour passed before I returned, by which time Monsieur Treville had gone up to his room, and Paul and Katya were sitting in the salon with only one lamp lit and no fire in the hearth.
“Papa wished you a good night,” Paul said. “And he asked me to thank you for bringing us to the fкte.”
“Yes,” Katya added, “I don’t remember when he enjoyed himself so much. It was good of you, Jean-Marc.” The words had the vacant sound of social rote, and she appeared worried and distant.
Paul rose. “Well, I think I shall go up myself.” He stifled a yawn. “I do hope the bad wine I’ve drunk will counteract any beneficial effects of all this vulgar exercise. Don’t keep her up too late, Montjean.” He laid his hand on Katya’s shoulder. “I’ve told Katya that you know all about Papa and his… problem. And I’ve asked her to listen to what you have to say before making up her mind whether she wants to go with us or stay.”
Katya’s eyes were lowered and her bodily attitude seemed heavy and burdened.
Paul held out his left hand to me. “I suppose I shan’t be seeing you again, Montjean. I would like to say that meeting you has been an undiluted pleasure, but you know me: helpless slave to the truth.” With a little wave he disappeared up the staircase.
That was the last time I saw Paul alive.
I turned to Katya, who continued to avert her eyes. All the energy and joy of life she had exhibited at the fкte seemed drained from her. After a moment of silence, I began, “Katya—”
“—It really was good of you to treat us to this day, Jean-Marc.” She spoke in a rush, as though to distract me from my purpose by a barrage of words. “Papa had such a good time, while only this morning his heart was heavy with the thought that he would have to move his books again and disturb the special chaos he thrives on. The picnic… the fкte… this has been a day to remember. I hope you don’t intend to spoil it all now.”
“Look at me, Katya.”
“I can’t… I…” I could see tears standing in her averted eyes.
I drew a sigh. “Shall we walk down to the summerhouse?”
“If you wish.” She rose, still avoiding my eyes, and went before me out through the terrace doors.
She sat in the broken wicker chair beneath the lattice of the summerhouse, and I leaned against the entrance arch. A cold moonlight slanted through the dense foliage, blotting the ground with patches of black and silver, and a night breeze was sibilant in the trees above us.
After a moment of silence, I began, “I want to talk about your father.”
She did not respond.
“I am sure you don’t really want to leave here… to leave me.”
She spoke in a quiet atonal voice. “Wanting has nothing to do with it. I have no choice.”
“That’s not true. You do have a choice, and you must make it. Perhaps Paul no longer has a choice. His appetite for life is slight anyway. But you, Katya… when I saw you dance… the way you looked when you walked back from the riverbank with your arms full of wildflowers… Katya, the joy of living is in every fiber of you!”
“I can’t leave my father! Paul and I… we’re responsible for Papa. We can never repay our debt to him.”
“That is nonsense. All children believe they’re eternally indebted to their parents, but that’s not true. If there is any debt, it’s the parent who should repay the child for bringing it into this world of pain and war and hatred, just for a moment’s gratification.”
“It’s different in our case. Papa loved our mother terribly—”
“Madly?”
She ignored this. “He was wholly devoted to her. She was his life, his happiness. She was a very beautiful woman, very delicate. Too delicate, really. Her body was slight and fragile… and we were twins. The birth was a difficult one. Either the mother could be saved, or the babies. So that Paul and I might live, Papa had to lose the thing he loved most… his world. How could we desert him now?”
I did not want to expose her to a painful truth, but everything was at stake. “Katya? I know about the young man in Paris.”
“Yes. Paul told me he had been forced to tell you about it.”
“ ‘Forced’ isn’t quite accurate, but let that pass. The fact is, I know what happened in Paris better than even you do. This won’t be pleasant to hear, but you must know the truth if you are to make an intelligent decision. Paul led you to believe that your father shot the young man by—”
“—You are going to tell me that the accident was not an accident, aren’t you,” she said calmly.
“You know?”
Her head still bowed, her eyes still on her folded hands, she said, “I’ve known from the beginning. I was standing outside the door to Father’s study when Paul talked to him that next morning. It isn’t nice to listen at doors, but I was desperate to know what to do, how to protect Father… not only from punishment, but from the realization of what he had done. When I heard Paul tell him that I had shot the young man, I was bewildered and terrified. He was lying, of course—I can tell when Paul is lying; there’s a certain hearty sincerity in his voice that is a sure giveaway. In fact, the only time he sounds sincere is when he’s lying. Then suddenly I understood what he was doing; he had thought of a way to make Father confess to his act without making him face the horrible truth of his insanity. Later that morning Paul came to me and we had a long talk. I expected him to confess the fiction he had used to protect Father. But instead, he told me that Father had shot Marcel by accident, mistaking him for an intruder. Once again, Paul spoke with that serious, sincere tone that signaled a lie. And once again, I understood what he was doing. He was trying to protect me from knowing that Father was mad.”
I pressed my fingertips against my forehead, trying to comprehend this tapestry of lies and half-truths. “And all this time Paul has believed that you accepted his story of the accidental shooting?”
“Yes.” For the first time, she looked into my eyes, a faint sad smile on her lips. “So you see, by pretending to believe Paul’s story, I am lying too, in a way. All three of us are lying, each to protect the others from the truth.”
“And you alone know that truth?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure you know the whole truth? Do you know why your father shot the young… this Marcel?”
“I believe so. I have considered it a great deal, and I believe I understand. There was the staggering shock of my mother’s death. There were the years of concealing his grief beneath a heavy schedule of study, of trying to insulate his pain with work. And all that time, the unexpressed grief festered within him. Then one night at an unguarded and vulnerable moment… perhaps he had been thinking about her, sitting in his study and remembering… perhaps weeping. He stepped into the garden for a breath of air… he saw his wife in the arms of another man… I look very much like my mother, you know. Yes, Jean-Marc, I think I know what happened.”
“Then you must realize that the feelings he has for you are morbid. You do realize that, don’t you?”
“They’re not feelings for me. They’re feelings for his wife.”
“They’re morbid all the same. And there is no reason in the world to believe he won’t break again, won’t kill another young man whose only crime is loving you and holding you in his arms.”
“Exactly! And that is why we must leave here, Jean-Marc! Don’t you see?”
I ran my fingers through my hair. “But you mustn’t leave! I mustn’t lose you! I love you, for God’s sake!” I stopped short at hearing myself say the words so violently. Then I repeated softly, “I love you, Katya.”
Her eyes searched my face with concern; then she gazed out over the moonlit garden as she seemed to ponder some inner puzzle. When she spoke, after a long silence, it was with a distant voice. “I am twenty-six years old, Jean-Marc. Twenty-six years old. My mother died when she was just twenty. It’s a very strange feeling to be older than your mother. Think of it. I am six years older than my…” Her voice trailed off into reverie.
“Katya? There’s something I must ask you. I believe I already know the answer, because a person in love is sensitive to the one he loves and can read all the little signs and hints. But you’ve never said it in so many words. Katya… do you love me?”
After a moment of silence, she said, “You know that I am very fond of—”
“—I am not speaking about fondness or liking or friendship. Do you love me?”
She smiled faintly and rather sadly. “My determined, passionate Basque.”
“Do you love me?” I insisted, my pulse quickening as an unforeseen doubt began to rise in me like a cold shadow.
She touched my cheek with her fingertips, then cupped it in her palm. Her soft eyes looked into mine with what I feared was pity. She lowered her gaze and withdrew her hand. “No, Jean-Marc,” she said softly. “I don’t love you.”
The earth seemed to drop away beneath me. For a second, I was numb. Then the hurt began to sting behind my eyes. I had to swallow to suppress the knot of tears in my throat.
She spoke almost in a whisper. “I won’t tell you how fond of you I am, Jean-Marc, because I know that would only add to your pain. But please believe me. I am very sorry that I don’t love you. I can’t explain why I don’t. I’ve daydreamed about loving you. I want to love you. I even feel I ought to. But…”
I turned away so she could not see my face. My voice was strained and thin when I spoke. “And the man in Paris… your Marcel… did you love him?”
She was silent for a long moment. “I was young and romantic enough to delight in the thought of being in love, but… no. No, I’ve come to the realization that I shall never love. Not everyone has that capacity, you know. So you see, even if it weren’t for Papa, I could not stay with you. I couldn’t…. Are you crying? Please don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying.” I turned my face even farther from her and struggled to make no sound as the tears hitched in my throat and streamed down my cheeks. “Please… don’t look at me. Give me a minute. I’ll be all right. Forgive me.”
She was sensitive enough not to come to me, not to console me, while I brought the first rush of pain and emptiness under control.
After several minutes I was able to breathe more evenly and the flow of tears stopped. “I’m sorry,” I said, wiping my eyes with my fingers. “These last few days have been hard. I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry about,” she said softly.
“There!” I scrubbed my cheeks with my palms and turned to her, smiling damply. “There we are! Childish breakdown completely under control. My goodness! You must not be feeling very well, young lady. You look all blurry. We are trained in medical school to recognize blurriness as a serious, but seldom fatal, symptom of… I can’t remember what of, just now.” The forced gaiety must have sounded as hollow and false as it was.
Her voice had a caressing quality like that of the soothing noises we make to a child who has fallen and scraped his knee. “You deserve happiness, Jean-Marc, and I know you will find it one day. You are so sensitive… so kind. And you’re very brave.”
“Brave? Yes… well. It’s a trick we Basques have, young lady. We conceal our courage behind tears. It fools our enemies into thinking we’re weak.”
“Dear, dear Jean-Marc.”
I sat on the steps of the summerhouse, my back to her, and looked up at the dark branches above us laced with a tracery of silver moonlight. She had just told me that she did not love me, and I believed her—my mind believed her. But in my soul and heart, I could not accept it, could not even comprehend it. I had never thought of love as something one person felt for another. I had always conceived of love as a state, a condition outside the two persons, a kind of shared shelter within which both could find comfort and confidence. So how could it be that I felt so total and intense a love, while she…?
Nor could I console myself with the possibility that she might one day come to love me. Young and romantic as I was, I could not view love as something one could grow into, a contract the items of which one could negotiate one by one. Either love was whole and absorbed you totally, or it was not love. It was something else. Something more reasonable and calm, perhaps; something quite nice in its own way… but something I did not want.
After a time, I drew a long breath and spoke to her, my voice calm, but thin and toneless. “All right. I accept that you don’t love me, Katya. But I love you. I don’t intend to burden you with my love, but I can’t deny it either. It exists. And because I love you, I cannot allow you to waste your life, running forever from fears and shadows.”
“There’s no point in trying to persuade me. I love my father… even as you say you love me.”
“Love him? Well, perhaps. But you don’t respect him.”
“That’s not true! How can you say that?”
“Do you really believe that if your father knew you were sacrificing your youth and future to protect him, he would allow it? You and Paul are making decisions on his behalf that he would never make himself. You’re treating him as though he were a mindless infant.”
“Jean-Marc, my father is…”—she had to press the word out—”…insane.”
“Yes, insane. But not irrational. He’s capable of love, of feeling, of making decisions for himself.”
Her voice hardened. “You’re not thinking of telling him the truth, are you?”
“I have considered it, yes. I’ve considered every means of saving you. But no, I don’t intend to tell him. It’s not my place to do that. It’s your place, Katya. Or Paul’s.”
“I never could. And if you did, I would hate you forever.”
I smiled bitterly. “I had hoped to hear you confess your love for me tonight. But instead, I’ve only discovered conditions under which you would hate me forever. I’m not doing very well, am I?”
She came down the steps and sat beside me, slipping her hand under my arm and laying her head against my shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Jean-Marc.”
I nodded and pressed her hand between my arm and side. Though the touch and warmth of her pleased me, it eroded my all-too-frangible barriers against the tears that began to sting and prick against the backs of my eyes. I compressed my lips and rose, stepping away to prevent her from seeing me cry.
But she came to me, taking me in her arms, pressing against me and rocking me gently, as though I were an injured child. I clung to her desperately, my cheeks against the side of her head so she could not look into my face. Her hair was soft and warm, and soon it was damp with my tears. I brushed her hair with my lips, then her ear, her neck, her throat… and my mouth found hers. I felt her body soften and blend into mine. Her pelvis pressed against me so hard I could feel the bones, and I pressed back, as though wanting to break the two layers of skin that separated our flesh. She squirmed against me; a little gasp and whimper caught in her throat as her fingers clutched at my back; she stiffened and held me with such force that her muscles trembled….
….Her body went slack in my arms; our kiss softened to a light touch of lips; then our mouths separated and I could see her eyes, moist and infinitely soft. Then confusion and fright grew in her eyes, and she pressed her hands against my chest and drew away, and all the warm places where we had touched together seemed cold. With nervous fingertips she brushed wisps of hair from her forehead, her glance anxious and averted.
“Oh, Jean-Marc,” she said breathlessly. “I’m sorry. That was terrible of me. It’s never happened to me before—that… feeling. I didn’t know! But… nothing has changed. This does not mean that I love you. And that’s why it was terrible of me to do this… to feel this. Please forgive me.”
“Katya…” I reached for her.
“No!” She stepped back, her eyes large with fright. Then she repeated more calmly. “No, Jean-Marc. No. Now I… I must go back to the house.”
“Please don’t leave me.”
“I must!”
“Katya, do you know that I promised Paul that I would never again try to see you after tonight?”
She lowered her eyes and nodded. “Yes. And I’m sure it’s best.” Her breathing was still shallow. “Yes, that is best. Now I must go.”
I yearned to say something that would make her stay. I wanted to take her into my arms and comfort again the cold places. But what was the use? What was the use?
I drew a long breath. “Well… good-bye, then, Katya.”
She didn’t look up at me. “Good-bye, Jean-Marc,” she said softly. And she turned and went up the path to Etcheverria.
I watched her go, dapples of pallid moonlight rippling over her white dress until she had disappeared among the ragged overgrowth.
* * *
I can’t say how long I sat in her wicker chair. Ten minutes? An hour? Impossible to know. My knees tight together, my eyes focused unseeing on the floor of the summerhouse, I felt infinitely alone, and I had a premonition that I would be alone forever. There was no bitterness in this realization, only a kind of calm hopelessness.
And even now, as I pen this description years later, my heart goes out to the lost and empty young man I picture sitting there. I no longer feel the pain. But I remember his… vividly.
Logic tells me that what I shall now relate could not have happened as I remember it. I cannot re-create the events and sensations objectively. All I can do is to describe what I recall to the limits of my skill, accepting that the memory retains only a distorted record of traumatic experiences.
I was sitting there—how long does not matter, for my distress was beyond time—until at last the floor of the summerhouse came back into focus and I found myself shivering with the late-night damp. I drew a long, shuddering sigh that stung my lungs. I had better return to Salies. Why not? What was to be gained by sitting there? I pushed myself out of the wicker chair numbly and started down the steps. I felt a shock, as though I had walked into a solid wall, and there was a blaze of pain in my right side. I think I remember a flash of red light, but I believe it was behind, not in front of, my eyes. I recall no sound, no explosion, but I knew—as one knows things in a nightmare—that I had been shot. The garden lurched to one side, and I was clutching at the doorframe of the summerhouse. My lips must have been pressed against the frame, because I remember the grit of flakes of paint in my mouth. Ice spread through my stomach. Ice in my legs. A tingling weakness down my spine. And the ground rushed up at me as I fell, not to the ground, but through it. Through it… and down, down, tumbling in an echoing chaos of blackness. I can feel the nausea as I write this, and my fingers weaken around the pen. Down and down. Splotches of dim light appeared below me and rushed upwards past me. And there was a sound, like a single bass note of an organ, droning in my ears. I realized with a dreadful calm that I was dying. I am dying. I was faintly surprised to be dying, but quite serene. I am dying. Don’t struggle. Don’t fight it. Let it come.
But no! The animal in me cried out. Live! Live!
I rushed towards another blotch of dim light, and I knew with a sureness beyond reason that this would be the last of the light and everything beneath would be blackness. The glow swelled as I yearned myself towards it. It smeared and swam, then came into focus. Moonlight. A tree of grass close before my eyes. A boot. The toe of a man’s boot. I reached out and grasped the boot to arrest my endless fall. But the boot was tugged from my hold. With all my strength, I looked up, and there, far above me, bulging and rippling like a reflection in water, was Monsieur Treville’s face.
“Please… please…” I muttered through a thick tongue.
His face registered horror, and he recoiled from me.
I heard his voice, hollow and distant. “Oh, my God! My God!”
The blackness was rising inside me again. I could feel its chill shadow swell from within. “Please?…”
And I fell back into the void. An endless blackness… no sound… no light… tumbling… floating…
… floating… towards something white… with lines in it… bars… squares… a window. A window that widened into a wall, all white.
The white walls of the clinic at Salies? What? The clinic?
“Well, well. Lazarus-like, he returns from, if not the dead exactly, at least the thoroughly damaged. Here, drink this down.” Doctor Gros held up my head and set a glass to my lips. “Bottoms up, as the cancan girls say.” The last swallow caught in my throat, making me cough, and the convulsion seared my right side with pain. “Nasty-tasting stuff, I know. But my patients wouldn’t think it efficacious if it were palatable. Something to do with the Christian assumption that pleasure is evil and pain redeeming, I shouldn’t wonder. No, no, don’t try to talk. You’ve lost a lot of blood, and you’ve undergone a general somatic shock. But no vital organ was hit. You’ll live to a ripe old age—not that the medical profession has much cause to rejoice at that prospect.”
“What… what happened to… where?… where?…” I couldn’t think clearly.
“You really should try to polish up your skills as a conversationalist, Montjean. Babbling is for politicians and priests. But I’d rather you didn’t talk for a while. I’ll explain a bit to set your mind at rest. Young Treville brought you here in their cariole. He said something about an accident while he was showing you his target pistols. Considering what we know of the history of that family, I assume that was a lie. Naturally, I considered contacting the gendarmerie, but in view of your relations with the family, I thought I’d better wait until you regained consciousness. And you certainly took your time about that. It’s early morning. I’ve been sitting up with you all night. You’ll doubtless have a relapse when you see my bill. Well? Is it a matter for the gendarmerie?”
I shook my head weakly.
“Hm-m-m. I don’t know how wise that is. But I’m willing to concede that it’s your affair. I’ve been pondering this most of the night—nothing much else to occupy my mind, you understand. I assume it was the old man who shot you?”
“I don’t… I couldn’t see.”
“Well, it stands to reason, doesn’t it? After all, he has earned a reputation for that sort of social excess.”
I resented his trivially joking tone, but I was too limp and empty to admonish him.
“It couldn’t have been the brother who shot you. If he is the expert shot he’s reputed to be, you would be out of your misery—administering to the medical needs of the Heavenly Host, whatever those needs might be. Palliatives for boredom, probably. Or restoratives after the shock of meeting up with friends and family you’d thought you were finally rid of forever.”
I turned my head to the window. “It’s morning?”
“Yes. You’ve been unconscious all night. I stood at the window and watched dawn come—a thing I haven’t done in years, and one I hope I shall be able to avoid in the future. It threatens to be another beautiful day, for all the good that does you.”
“Please… please help me get up.”
“Don’t be stupid! You know, something just occurred to me. I wonder just how good a shot the Treville boy would be, considering that he would have to shoot with his left hand. Something to ponder, eh? Food for thought.”
“Dr. Gros? I must go to Etcheverria. Katya…”
“Listen to me, son. Your wound is still fresh. The bullet just clipped your side. You’re luckier than you deserve. You’ve benefited from God’s peculiar affection for fools, drunks, and lovers. But you’ve lost a lot of blood.”
“I must go!”
“Don’t be an ass, Montjean. That was laudanum I gave you just now. In a few minutes you’ll be unconscious and out of harm’s way. There’s no point in fighting it.”
I could already feel a velvet numbness rising in my brain. Although I knew it was futile, I could not help struggling against it. Katya needed me. When the opiate finally overwhelmed me, I went under in a nauseating turmoil of resistance and terror.
When I emerged again into consciousness, I was alone in the room, bathed in sweat and so weak that it took concentrated effort to lift my head and look towards the window. From the quality of the light I knew it was midafternoon. With trembling effort, I sat up and gingerly slipped my legs over the side of the bed. A wave of giddiness passed off, leaving me with a throbbing headache. I tugged up my nightdress and pulled off the plaster to examine my wound. It was tender and raw, and two ugly black threads merged with the redness where Doctor Gros had stitched it closed, but the wound was quite superficial and there was no bleeding. I redressed it; then I ventured to stand beside the bed. There was dizziness and a swim of pain, but I could stay on my feet. My clothes were hanging on a peg on the far wall, and I got dressed, moving cautiously, leaning against the wall each time a wave of light-headedness overcame me. My clothes were soiled, and the shirt was stiff with blood on the right, but I did not dare return to my boardinghouse for a change lest Doctor Gros discover my absence and make a commotion. Slipping unnoticed out the back door, I made my way to the stable where I found the boy drowsing on a pile of loose hay. He harnessed up the mare for me, and soon I was out of Salies and on the road to Etcheverria.