“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

  The shaking of the trap was painful at first, but the stiffness slowly worked itself out, and the cool breeze and lemon sunlight began to refresh me and renew my strength.
   I did not dare anticipate what I would find at Etcheverria. Indeed, I had only the vaguest idea of what I would do there; but I felt that Katya needed me, and nothing in the world could have kept me away.
   The poplars lining the lane up to the house blocked the breeze, and the sound of the mare’s hooves seemed peculiarly loud in the silence as I passed the decaying wall of the overgrown garden. I descended from the trap and stood for a moment in the graveled courtyard. The front door of the house gaped wide open, and the only sound was the moaning of the wind high in the treetops. There was an undefinable but most palpable ambience of desertion about the place. A cold dread stiffened the hairs on the nape of my neck, and I knew instinctively that I was too late. Too late for… I did not know what.
   I passed through into the central hall and called out Katya’s name. No answer. I looked into the salon. No one. The dining room was empty. I went down the short hall to Monsieur Treville’s study and tapped at the door. There was no response. I pushed it open and stepped in. The desk was stacked with books and papers in the toppling disarray I remembered, and the floor was strewn with open boxes and piles of books, as though the old scholar had stepped out and would return at any moment to continue packing for his move to yet another home.
   At the foot of the staircase I called up, “Katya?” No answer. “Katya!” Silence. I climbed the stairs quietly and stood in the upper hall where I had never been before. The walls of the stairwell were bright with diffuse sunlight from the open front door below, but the hall was dark and all the doors leading off it were closed. I had no idea which room was hers. I tapped at the nearest door and, when there was no response, I pressed it open and peered in. The shutters were half-closed, and the only light came from the softly billowing curtains which glowed, alive with a blur of sunlight that was blinding in the darkness. I could dimly make out a figure on the bed… a man… fully clothed. “Paul?” I called softly. “Monsieur Treville?” The figure did not stir. I quietly approached the bed.
   It was Monsieur Treville lying on his back atop the counterpane, and I noticed that his boots were still on. “Monsieur Treville? Sir?” The breeze pressed the glowing curtains out, and briefly the face was brilliantly visible before it receded back into the gloom.
   My glance winced away in shock and disgust. There was a small black hole in the right temple, and the upper third of the left side of his face was blown away. A wave of nausea rose in me, and I felt my knees go slack. I caught myself on the bedstead and held on until the faintness passed; then I stumbled out of the room and stood in the hall, giddy. Through the vertiginous stupor of shock, I clung to one thought: I must find Katya! The two remaining doors off the hall were closed. I forced myself to approach the nearest and put my hand on the knob. It took all my concentrated will to turn the knob, dreading what I might find within.
   “That’s Katya’s room, Montjean.”
   I gasped and spun around. Standing at the head of the stairs in the heavy shadow was Paul’s figure, difficult to distinguish against the bright walls of the stairwell.
   “You mustn’t disturb her.” The voice was peculiar… harsh… strained. “She’s been through a terrible experience. Let her rest.”
   I peered at him through the dark of the hall. He had a strangely rumpled appearance; his clothes hung slackly on him; his hair looked oddly chopped and disarranged. And the target pistol he held in his right hand dangled at his side.
   But the face, barely discernible through the gloom… The soft sensitive eyes…
   A wave of horror chilled my skin. “Katya?” I breathed.
   “She’s resting, I told you. I won’t have her disturbed.” She constricted her throat to force the note of her voice deeper. The effect was a ghastly rasp that made me shudder.
   I had to think! I had to control my emotions. Be calm and think. “May I… may I look in on her… Paul? Just for a second?”
   She stared at me for a long moment. “Very well. But don’t wake her. She needs her rest. She is weary… so weary….” The tone of plaintive compassion contrasted eerily with the macabre rasp of her voice.
   My heart pounding, my mind awash with fear, I pushed the door open partway. This room, too, was heavy with shadow, deepened by the contrasting glare of sunlight through the gently billowing curtains. I closed the door softly behind me and crossed to the bed. Paul lay on his back, his arms at his sides, his legs straight and stiff. He was dead. She had covered him with one of her white dresses, its collar tucked under his chin, its arms carefully placed over his arms, giving the impression that he was wearing the garment. And his face, in repose so like hers, lent grotesque realism to the illusion.
   “Oh, my God,” I breathed.
   I folded the dress down and discovered a blot of dark blood over his shirtfront, in the center of which was a small black hole. He had been shot through the heart. But there was no blood on the counterpane upon which he lay. He had been shot somewhere else and carried—dragged, more likely—up to her bedroom. I shuddered to imagine the terrible effort it must have cost her to drag and tug his limp body up those broad stairs and into her room. And heaving it up onto the bed…
   I carefully replaced the dress over him, and I stepped back into the hall, closing the door behind me.
   She had not moved from the head of the stairs, where she was a silhouette of shadow against the glowing walls of the stairwell. “Is she sleeping?” she asked.
   I drew a long breath. “Yes. She’s… resting.”
   “Good,” she said in her forced gravelly voice. There was a moment of silence.
   “I… Paul? May I have a few words with you?” I asked hesitantly.
   She raised one eyebrow in Paul’s superior way. “If you must, old boy.” She turned and preceded me down the stairs. As I walked behind her I saw that she had crudely chopped her hair short and had tried to plaster it down with water.
   A Drowned Virgin?
   When, months later, I could review these events with a clearer mind, I realized that I had felt no sense of personal danger. I was afraid, to be sure, but not for myself. I recognized that Katya was quite mad. I assumed that she had killed her brother and perhaps her father with the target pistol she carried nonchalantly in her hand. There was no reason to believe she might not kill me. And yet, there was no place in the tangle of my emotions for fear. Perhaps the thought of being dead, of being out of it all, had a certain attraction.
   My overwhelming emotion was pity… love and pity that tugged my heart towards her. Her body small and fragile within Paul’s ill-fitting clothes, her hair standing up in wet cowlicks, she looked so much the tragicomic clown, half grotesque, half pathetic, that I yearned to take her in my arms and comfort her. But I realized that if there were the slightest chance of guiding her back to reality, I must allow her to play out the role in which she found some kind of safety, some shelter from the storms raging in her mind.
   We entered the salon and she turned to me with a supercilious expression and asked in Paul’s bored drawl, “I suppose you could do with a brandy? After all, it isn’t every day a fellow manages to get himself shot while wooing a young lady in a garden. It’s an event worthy of celebration.”
   I accepted the brandy she offered without pouring one out for herself. “Shall we take it on the terrace?” she asked. “It’s another of those tediously exquisite days Katya is forever cooing about. We might as well subject ourselves to its ineffable beauty.”
   I followed her out onto the terrace, and we sat overlooking the tangled garden. She sat with her ankles lightly crossed and her knees together, the graceful line of her body contrasting strangely with her costume.
   How to start? What to say? I found myself slipping into the cautious, controlled, rather patronizing style of communication I had learned at the asylum at Passy. Hoping to discover how much she was aware of events around her, I began, “How’s your father?”
   She glanced at me quickly, mistrust in her eyes. “You were coming from my father’s room when I found you in the hall. You know perfectly well that he’s dead.”
   I nodded. “Yes, I’m sorry. How did he die?”
   “My dear fellow, I would have imagined that a man of medical training, even one so inexperienced as you, could deduce that he shot himself… took the gentleman’s way out.”
   “Out of what?”
   “When he found you in the garden, he—” She stopped suddenly in midphrase and stared at me, confusion and doubt welling up in her eyes. When she spoke again, the guttural tone was gone. It was Katya’s voice. “I don’t understand… you were… weren’t you…?” She touched her brow with her fingertips.
   “I was shot, yes, but only wounded. Nothing serious.”
   “Only wounded? Yes, but…” She was adrift from reality, her expression vague. “Yes, but… I…”
   “You say your father found me in the garden,” I prompted. “But it was he who shot me, wasn’t it?”
   “Papa? How could you believe that? Papa was so gentle. He could never harm anyone.”
   “Listen—” I yearned to reach out and take her hand to reassure her, but I couldn’t tell where she was in the vague terrain between herself and her persona as Paul, and Paul would have recoiled from my touch. I soon learned to read the slight but dramatic indications of her shift from one personality to the other: the husky lowering of the voice, the shallowing of the eyes, the tensing of the mouth into Paul’s habitually disdainful expression. But at this moment I had to guess which one I was talking to. “Listen… Paul? Yesterday you told me about what happened in Paris. Tell me about that again please.”
   She put the pistol in her lap and looked out across the garden, her eyes distant, her voice flat. “I probably didn’t tell you the truth yesterday… not the whole truth, anyway.”

   That “probably” signaled to me that she had retreated back into Paul, but lacked his memory of events. There was a cunning quality to her negotiations between beings.
   “Well, tell me the whole truth now. Begin in Paris, shortly before you moved here to Salies.”
   Her eyes hardened, her nostrils dilated slightly, and when she spoke her voice had returned to that forced rasp that chilled my spine. “Oh, it began before that, old boy. Long before that. It began when poor Katya was a young girl just entering womanhood. When she was still the awkward and coltish Hortense.”
   I had a flash of insight. “When she was fifteen and a half?”
   “Yes. Just fifteen and a half.” She looked at me and smiled thinly. “I take it you’re thinking about her ghost?”
   “Yes, I was. What happened to Katya when she was fifteen and a half?”
   She frowned, seeming to recoil from the memory. “It’s not a pleasant thing to think about. It’s an ugly… shameful…”
   My intuition told me that Katya would not be able to recount the event, whatever it was. I would have to learn it through Paul. “Please tell about it… Paul.”
   She was silent for a time; then she began to speak, her eyes fixed on the middle distance, out across the ragged garden. “I had a friend visiting for a month that summer—a handsome rogue of a fellow several years older than I who was introducing me to the delights of gambling and other civilized dissipations. We were out on the town almost every night, if not playing cards, then putting the street walkers of St. Denis into… amusing situations. It was all typical of young men of my class. Wild oats and all that. Good dirty fun.
   “It was this fellow’s practice to pay a kind of teasing court to Katya, as men in their twenties will do with teenaged girls, delighting in their shyness and awkwardness. They used to chat over dinner or take little strolls in the garden. As you might expect, she was both pleased and flattered by his attentions. He was a dashing rake, and she was poised—teetering, really—between adolescence and young womanhood. I never thought much of it. Indeed, I joined in the game, teasing her about her little infatuation, the way a brother will.
   “There was a cruel streak in that man, one that came out in his treatment of the St. Denis girls. But it never occurred to me to worry about his behavior with Katya. After all, we were gentlemen of the same class, and Katya was my sister. Of course, she wasn’t Katya then. She was still Hortense. The shy, blushing Hortense…” Her eyes lowered and she seemed to drift into reverie.
   After a moment of silence, I said, “And?”
   Her hands were folded on her lap over the pistol, and she dug the fingernails of one hand into the palm of the other. “He… he raped her.” Her eyes searched mine frantically, seeming to ask if such a horrible thing were possible. “He raped Hortense. He raped Hortense!”
   I had anticipated that with a growing dread, but my stomach went cold at the words, uttered with such a tone of desperate pity for the long-dead Hortense. I wanted to hold her, to console her; but I pressed on, hoping to cleanse her mind of the terror by making her talk about, confront it, expose the wound to the healing effects of understanding. I was careful to keep my voice neutral and atonic when I prompted, “Yes. He raped Hortense.”
   She took several deep, calming breaths, and her voice was gruff again when she spoke. “This fellow and I came home that night, late as usual, but somewhat drunker than usual. I fell into my bed and was dead to the world in a minute. He must have slipped out of his room and tapped at her door. He suggested that they take a stroll in the garden under the moonlight. It was a soft, beautiful night, and she was as full of the gossamer excitement of romance as any adolescent girl. No doubt there was a thrill of daring to sneak out and walk with a man in a moonlit garden.” Katya smiled and glanced at me almost coyly, her eyes round with impish mischief as she caught her lower lip between her teeth and lifted her shoulders. “I was embarrassed and flustered about my appearance. My nightgown was one of those long shapeless flannel things—not at all feminine. And my hair had been taken down for bed and was all tangled and…” She touched her hair, and her expression faded from animated excitement to uncertainty and fear….
   For an instant, and for the only time, I had met Hortense. The gentle ghost in the garden.
   … Her expression faded as her fingers recoiled from the feeling of hair that was cropped and plastered down with water. Clouds of confusion crossed her eyes. Then her jaw muscles tensed and she spoke again in Paul’s voice. “I told you there was a streak of cruelty in the man. Hurting the St. Denis prostitutes was a part of his pleasure. And furthermore he was drunk. He… he threw Hortense down into the mud of a flowerbed, and he beat her with his fists… he beat her!… her lips were broken… and he hit her in the stomach… hard… again and again!”
   “You don’t have to tell me if it’s too painful.”
   “…He pressed his fingers against her eyes! And he told her that if she screamed he would push her eyes out—like grapes popping out of their skins—that’s what he whispered in her ear—like grapes popping out of the skin! He pressed so hard she could see flashes of light! And the pain! Then he… Then he…!”
   “You don’t have to tell me, Katya!”
   “Oh, Jean-Marc! He did such things to me!” She was crying and the words caught in her throat.
   But as I rose to take her into my arms and comfort her, her expression chilled. Her face flattened and her lips grew thin, and her eyes, still damp with tears, hardened. I put my hand on her shoulder and patted her, as one might pat the shoulder of a male friend in emotional distress.
   When she spoke again, it was Paul’s atonal, slightly nasal voice. “I shall never know why, but I awoke at first light that morning, despite the fact that I was heavy with a hangover. I decided to take the air of the garden to clear my head. I found her there… sitting in the garden swing… quite nude. Her flesh was like ice and she shivered convulsively. Her face was… was all battered and swollen. She just sat there, rocking herself, staring ahead, humming one note again and again. I put my robe around her and brought her back to the house. She came docilely. I don’t believe she even realized I was there. As best I could, I cleaned her up and put her into bed and heaped feather comforters over her. She didn’t resist, but she didn’t help herself either. She was like a body empty of spirit. I sat beside her for hours, stroking her hair and telling her that everything would be all right… everything would be all right. She just lay there, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. I doubt she understood what I was saying, but there may have been some slight comfort in the sound of a human voice. Finally… late in the afternoon… she fell asleep. Her eyelids closed suddenly, and she was in a deep sleep… so deep that I was afraid for a moment that she was dead.”
   Katya stopped speaking, and she concentrated on lightly stroking her palm where the fingernails had pressed in, leaving deep reddish dents. I let my hand fall from her shoulder and sat down again, pulling my chair closer to her. “But of course she didn’t die,” I said. “She survived.”
   She smiled thinly, bitterly. “No, she didn’t die. But she didn’t survive either. To keep Katya’s shame from the servants—I thought of it that way! I thought of it as her shame! Jesus Christ, Montjean, how can men think of it that way?!” She closed her eyes and drew a long, shuddering breath before continuing. “To keep her shame from the servants and the outside world, I made up the story that she had smallpox and was quarantined. Only I could attend to her needs, as I had already had smallpox and was immune. For two weeks I sat with her day and night. I had a cot brought in and I slept there; I fed her from a tray sent up and left outside the door; and I talked to her hour after hour, keeping up a flow of soothing nonsense, recalling silly things we had done when we were children, telling her about my plans for when she got well—anything to avoid the silence. For, you see, she never spoke. She just lay in her bed or sat in a chair by the window. Withdrawn. Silent. Her eyes never looked into mine. In time, her bruises healed, but she remained detached and somehow… elsewhere.”
   “That must have been a very distressing time for you as well, Paul. After all, you were a very young man yourself.”
   She nodded. “Yes. It was for me that nondescript summer between school and university. I was ahead by two years, you see.” She looked at me in Paul’s archly bored way. “I was quite a brilliant lad, in my own shallow way. Precocious. And with this newfound friend of mine I was trying my wings for the first time, as it were. Men are so lucky. I wish Katya had been born a boy. Oh, how Katya wished she had been born a boy! If only she had been the boy! Men don’t get raped, you see! It isn’t fair!”

   “I understand.”
   “It isn’t fair! It’s so much safer being a man!”
   I touched her arm. “You’re right. It isn’t fair. It isn’t just.”
   “How do you know?” she snarled.
   There was a flash of hatred in her eyes; then it melted into an expression of hopeless pity. “Yes… Katya should have been born the boy.”
   After a moment of silence, I said, “Paul, you mentioned a moment ago that Hortense didn’t die, but didn’t survive either. What did you mean by that?”
   “Just what I said. Hortense never recovered. Only Katya did. One day I returned to her room after being gone for a short time, and I found her fully dressed for the first time. She greeted me with a flood of cheerful small talk, and she was full of energy and plans. She wondered if we could go to the park; perhaps we could stop at a patisserie on the way; she was starved, and she had a particular hunger for pastry, the sweeter and gummier the better; and she wanted to go on a clothes-buying spree. She said the dress she was wearing was the only one that pleased her. It was a white dress reserved for lawn parties. Perhaps you have noticed that she only wears white: the color of chastity?” This last was said in Paul’s most ironic tone. “I was relieved and delighted with her return to vigor and an appetite for life, and I told her we would walk through all the parks in Paris, and eat the patisserie shelves bare, and return home with a carriage full of dresses—all white, if that’s what she wanted. In the course of saying this, I called her by name, but she frowned and told me that she was no longer Hortense. She had a new name. Katya. She asked what I thought of it. I told her I thought it was a perfectly wonderful name for a wonderful, wonderful young lady.
   “During the weeks that followed, she was all gaiety and song, full of life. Full too—I regret to say—of a newly found enthusiasm for that most base form of humor, the pun—plays on words, double meanings, near rhymes, and sometimes not so near. I used to complain about this moronic level of wit, until it occurred to me that there was something particularly fascinating for her in words with two meanings, in symbols reflecting two realities. After all, her body had housed two quite different personalities; ‘Katya’ and ‘Hortense’ were synonyms; she was a kind of living pun. Several times during those early weeks I tried, as obliquely as possible, to refer to what had happened to her. I wanted her to feel free to talk about it to me; I wanted to let her know that there was no shame in it for her, no fault. I even dared to mention the man’s name once. Just a glancing reference, of course, in passing. She reacted with a light joke about not seeing him about anymore, and she wondered if her obvious crush on him had driven him away. I realized that it was gone, vanished; the horrible episode was erased from her memory. Hortense couldn’t live with the memory of the rape, so she was replaced by Katya, who had no such scar on her past.” She looked at me with that searching blend of curiosity and amusement that was characteristic of her. “And that was all there was to it, you see? The memories were all gone. All gone.” She smiled and shrugged.
   “You’re sure they were all gone?” I asked.
   There was an almost imperceptible change in her eyes, which had softened to become Katya’s eyes. They became shallow and brittle. When she spoke, it was with Paul’s harsh throatiness. “Oh, of course, bits of it came up from time to time, like flotsam after a shipwreck. There were her white dresses, for instance. Her sudden interest in anatomy. Her fascination with the writings of that Austrian fellow—Freud. I suppose that, without realizing it, she was trying to understand what had happened to her… and why. But it was a long time before the poison came to the surface. A long time. Years and years.” Her voice trailed off as her mind seemed to release whatever she was thinking of. She looked down at the pistol in her lap and frowned, as though noticing it for the first time. Then she brought it to her breast and hugged it while she looked out across the garden to the cloudless sky beyond.
   “Paul?” I said uneasily. “May I have the gun?”
   “What?” She stared at me with a frown of comic disbelief, as though that were the silliest request she had ever heard. “Certainly not, old fellow! What an idea!”
   A horripulation of dread tingled down my spine. I rose and stretched. “Would you mind if we strolled along as we talked? My side’s getting stiff sitting here.”
   “If you wish.” She preceded me down the path, walking with a cocky step that reminded me of Paul’s nonchalant strut away from the fight at the fкte d’Alos.
   The walk gave me time to focus my thoughts towards some kind of understanding. I recognized Katya’s flight from reality to be classic, not unlike those I had read in case studies before my experiences at Passy had caused me to abandon all thoughts of specializing in mental illnesses. The rape had terribly cicatrized and battered the emotions of the romantic, adolescent Hortense beyond her capacity to survive. So Hortense died… became a faint ghost, forever fifteen and a half years old, forever hovering in a garden, and she was replaced by Katya, newborn and therefore virginal. Katya, with her habitual dresses of chaste white. Katya, with her peculiar interest in anatomy and psychology. Katya, who had frozen and retreated into a distant daydream when I held her and kissed her; who had, in a way of speaking, slipped out of the body that might respond shamefully to the urgings of physical love. How frightening and confusing it must have been for her last night, when her preoccupation with the distress of our parting had prevented her from slipping out of her body before the pleasure of love had swept over her! What a blundering fool I was!
   And now, for some reason, she could no longer maintain the persona of Katya, and was in the process of becoming Paul. But the transition was not yet complete. She seemed to hover between the two personalities, slipping back and forth, never quite Katya, never quite Paul. Why did she hang in this uncertain twilight between two beings? Perhaps because she could best examine and understand what had happened to her from this ambiguous coign of vantage? She had been explaining things to me—motives as well as events—that neither Katya nor Paul could have understood alone, but which became clear when illuminated by the exterior vision of the one and the interior vision of the other. So long as she resided in this vague no-man’s-land, she could examine her own experiences and memories with Paul’s emotional distance. But what would happen once the examination had been completed? Would she continue her voyage and become Paul? Would she return to Katya?
   I walked behind her down the path. The nape of her neck, revealed by the hasty cropping of her hair, seemed slim and fragile in Paul’s too-large collar. I felt that I had to help her learn whatever it was she was yearning to understand. It was my only hope, if ever she were to become again the Katya I loved. “So,” I asked softly, “life for Katya went on more or less as it had been before that terrible night in the garden?”
   She shrugged and spoke over her shoulder. “Pretty much. Years passed and she blossomed into a handsome young woman. Considering her station and her family’s position among the gratin of Paris society, she naturally became a focus of social attention by the time of her coming out.” She shook her head and smiled bitterly. “It’s odd, but even her practice of wearing only white was accepted as a kind of… coquettish trademark, you might say.”
   “And your father never knew what had happened to her in the garden?”
   “Not at that time. Later, it became necessary for me to tell him.”
   “Oh? What happened to make it necessary?”
   She did not respond. We had reached the summerhouse, and she climbed the steps and sat, by habit, in the battered wicker chair, but she flung one leg over the arm in a slouching posture that Paul might have affected.
   I took up my usual station at the entrance, leaning against the arch, one foot up on the steps. “You mentioned that this thing buried so deeply within Katya emerged eventually. Tell me about that, Paul.”
   “No. I don’t want to.”
   “You do want to actually.”

   “No!”
   Following the methods I had learned at Passy, I remained silent for several minutes, waiting for her to take the lead. The only sounds in the fading, late-summer garden were the drone of insects and the trilling calls of birds high up in the trees. When at last she spoke, it was in an atonic voice, as though without volition. “There were always young men around her. She was, after all, young… clever… not totally unattractive. Her intelligence and her keen sense of the ridiculous drove the most pompous of them away, as she scorned the practice of most women of her class, pretending to be silly, stupid, and easily impressed so as not to frighten off the ‘good catches.’ Suitors came and went; then one fellow seemed to emerge from the pack—a pleasant enough person, good-looking, kind, romantic, and of passable means and connections. I found him tolerable, if tiresomely idealistic and intense.” She glanced at me with Paul’s cocked eyebrow. “As you see, her taste is fairly consistent.”
   I smiled and nodded.
   “In the course of time, the fellow began to appear at our door almost every evening—”
   “This was Marcel?”
   “Yes, Marcel. He and Katya would talk in the salon, mostly about poetry and love and such rubbish, or they would take long walks in the garden. Then… one night…” She slipped her leg off the arm of the chair and sat rigidly. “…One night…” She fell silent and stared ahead.
   “Then one night?”
   “What?” she asked vaguely.
   “Then one night…?
   “I was in my room writing letters. I heard a gunshot from the garden. I rushed down to find her just returning through the garden doors. She walked past me, not seeing me, staring ahead and humming one note over and over again. ‘My God, Katya!’ I shouted at her. ‘What has happened?’ But she just continued past me up the stairs towards her room. On the terrace I found my target pistol. And in the garden… I found the young man. He was… he was…” She stopped speaking and stared ahead, her eyes fixed.
   “He was dead?”
   She nodded slowly, and continued nodding like a mechanical toy until I asked:
   “But what had happened? Why had she shot him?”
   She didn’t answer for a time; then she looked at me with an expression of impish cunning. “I couldn’t know for certain. I wasn’t there. Only Katya could know what happened.”
   “All right… yes… I realize that. But tell me what you think happened, Paul.”
   “I can only surmise. Perhaps the young man grew passionate. Perhaps his love made him hold her long and tightly in a kiss. Perhaps she began to feel stirrings of pleasure deep within her. Ugly, shameful, disgusting pleasure! Perhaps she broke away and ran into the salon. Perhaps she found the gun. Perhaps she considered killing herself… punishing herself for feeling that foul, shameful pleasure. But then… perhaps… she realized with sudden clarity that it wasn’t she who had sinned, it wasn’t she who deserved punishment. It was the young man in the garden—the young man who had raped her! Who had hit her in the stomach again and again! Who had hurt her eyes! Who had done such painful, horrible things…!” Her eyes were wild, and her body shuddered with the force of her passion. She stiffened and clenched her teeth, calming her breathing with great effort. Then she looked at me, her eyes narrowing with infantile craftiness. “I don’t know all this, of course. I can only surmise.”
   “Yes, I understand that. I understand. Look… Paul… before this happened, you had no indication that Katya was approaching a breakdown?”
   She shook her head. “No, none. Well… none that I then recognized as an indication. I had thought it was all gone, all buried beneath layers of emotional scar tissue—if you will allow me to borrow a metaphor from your field. It is true that she had mentioned, rather light-heartedly, a ghost in the garden… a young girl all in white. But I didn’t make anything of it. She had always been an imaginative girl, given to making up stories for the fun of it… just to have people on.”
   “And that was why you reacted so strangely that night when I mentioned her ghost in the garden?”
   “Exactly. It was not until that moment that I recognized the ghost as a symptom of approaching breakdown. After all, Doctor, it takes at least two events to make a pattern. But I knew instantly that we had to leave this place… leave you… as soon as possible.” She looked at me uncertainly. “I probably warned you that you were in some personal danger. It would be like me to do that.”
   “Yes, you did. But I thought you were threatening danger from you. I assumed… but that doesn’t matter now. I take it Katya retained no memory of shooting the young man?”
   “Not a trace. By the time I went up to her that night, she was lying in her bed, reading. She chatted light-heartedly, even inflicting some of her wretched puns on me.” She glanced at me obliquely. “Fond of her though you were, even you must confess that her puns could be painful.”
   I smiled. “On the contrary, I find them charming.”
   She pushed out her lower lip and shrugged.
   She had spoken of Katya in the past tense; I had replied in the present, unwilling to accept that the transformation to Paul was accomplished and permanent. “Paul? If she had no memory of the event, how did you account for the young man’s death?”
   “It was Father who did that. After discovering the young man dead in the garden, I had to tell him everything, all the way back to the rape that had been the cause of her imbalance. He was stunned, of course. Stricken. But he rose to the task of protecting the daughter he loved so much, the daughter who was so like the wife he had lost. He used to be a clever and brilliant man, you know. It was he who devised the scheme of telling her that he had had a breakdown and had committed the murder while temporarily mad. In that way, we tricked her into cooperating with us to conceal from the world what had actually happened. It was then that the complicated tapestry of falsehoods became so baroque and fragile. Katya believed that Father had committed the murder but had no memory of it. That night she crept down and overheard us talking through the study door, overheard me tell Father that she had killed the boy. Confused, shocked, she returned to her room and lay awake through the night, trying to reason out why I would tell so terrible a lie. I need hardly tell you, with your morbid fascination with the drivel of Dr. Freud, that the human psyche has enormous capacity for reshaping unacceptable reality into palatable fictions. She managed to convince herself that I had lied to Father, using the very sincerity of my voice as evidence that I was not telling the truth. She fabricated a rationale that involved my telling Father that she had killed the young man in order to trick him into confessing to an accidental shooting, when in fact he had killed in the throes of insanity. Do you see what I mean by ‘baroque’? When she told me the next morning that she understood everything, I grasped the chance to protect her from the truth and confessed that she was correct in her assumptions.” Katya looked at me with a lifted eyebrow and Paul’s mirthless smile in her eyes. “Is all this sufficiently complicated and tangled for your taste, Montjean? I believe you Basques have a particular penchant for the devious and the oblique.”
   “But, obviously, she eventually learned the truth. How did that happen?”
   She frowned and seemed to struggle to comprehend this dangerous paradox. Then her face became heavy and expressionless and she asked, in the strained rasp of Paul’s voice, “What makes you believe Katya ever discovered the whole truth?”
   How could I explain that I knew because it was she who was telling me? I sensed this was a dangerous line to pursue, so I retreated and sought another avenue that might bring her to a liberating understanding of all that had happened. “So your father confessed to having killed the young man accidentally in order to protect Katya from discovering that she had done it. What happened then?”
   “What happened? To Father, you mean?”
   “Very well. What happened to your father?”
   “His worry about Katya, and the dangerous legal inquiry into the boy’s death, drained his spirit. I knew he could never withstand another such incident. That’s why I brought them here, out of harm’s way. And when it began to happen all over again, with you– Why in God’s name did you persist in your attentions to Katya?! I warned you again and again! Goddamn you, Montjean! Goddamn you and your ******* interference!”
   She used a term that even Paul would never have uttered in public. I lowered my eyes and said nothing. And I remembered with a shudder how Mlle M., at the Passy asylum, would occasionally burst out in gutter profanity so shockingly dissonant with her personality and breeding.
   When she spoke again, her voice was calm, even hollow. “Then last night, Father heard the shot and ran out to find you lying on the ground, clutching at his boot and begging him to help you. He stood there, stunned. It had happened again! His daughter… his Hortense who looked so like his beloved wife… was totally, irremediably insane. He recoiled from you, lying there, pleading, the proof of Katya’s diseased mind. He turned away and walked back to his study as though in a trance. He sat at his desk; he carefully rephrased a footnote he had been working on; in the margin he cited a confirming cross-reference; then he closed his notebook and… and he shot himself. Shot himself. Just… just…” Her voice trailed off.
   “How do you know what happened in the garden? Were you there, Paul?”

   She frowned at me, as though slightly annoyed by the irrelevancy of my question. “What? What do you mean?”
   I had found a little chink in the welding of Katya’s personality to Paul’s, and I hoped it would be possible to pry them apart gently, without destroying the fiction that was sustaining her. “How can you describe what your father did in the garden, Paul? Were you there?”
   She shook her head. “No, I… I was in my room… asleep.”
   “I see. Then how do you know what happened?”
   “Well… well, Katya was standing right there in the shadow. She hadn’t moved from the spot after leveling the target pistol at you and pressing the trigger.” Her brow wrinkled with the strain of trying to understand. Then she looked at me defiantly, her eyes harried, as she said quickly, “Katya must have told me about it.”
   “Did she?”
   “Yes. Yes. She must have. How else—what does it matter how– Oh yes, I remember. Katya woke me to tell me that you were lying wounded in the garden. That’s when she explained what had happened. I dressed hastily and rushed down.”
   “Your father was still alive at that time?”
   “Yes. He was still in his study, writing. It wasn’t until Paul returned that he found him. Dead by his own hand. And he—”
   “What? Paul returned to find him?”
   Her eyes flickered. She drew a quick breath but continued airily, “Yes, I found him when I returned from bringing you to the clinic at Salies. I carried him up to his bedroom so that Katya wouldn’t blunder in and discover him looking… with the side of his face all… Afterwards, I searched for her everywhere, and at last I found her sitting in her wicker chair in the summerhouse—sitting here just as I am—and I knew at first glance that something had ruptured in her mind when she shot you, allowing all the terrible, insupportable truth to rush in. She remembered everything. The rape of Hortense. Killing poor Marcel. And she told me all about it, calmly, succinctly… almost clinically.”
   “But, Paul, listen. Try to understand this. If she can remember all of it, then there’s a chance for her to recover! Don’t you see that? With time and professional help, she might be able to live a full life with someone who loves her!”
   But she closed her eyes and shook her head. “No. The floodgates to all that pain and horror opened for only a moment… a confusing and horrible moment… but even as she described events to me, the details began to grow fuzzy… distorted. The shock of seeing you on the ground, of thinking you were dying, opened the old wounds for a moment, but the searing rush of agonizing memories cauterized them again, sealing the flow, closing them… but not healing them.” She looked at me, her eyes sad and gentle, and she spoke in her own voice. “She had wanted so desperately to protect you from a danger she sensed but did not understand. She even told you that she did not love you, hoping to drive you away, keep you safe. Can you imagine what pain it must have cost her to look into your eyes… those black Basque eyes… and tell you that she did not love you?” The hint of a minor-key smile touched the corners of her eyes as they looked into mine for a long affectionate moment. Then her expression hardened, and when she spoke it was in Paul’s harsh voice. “Then quite suddenly, while she was trying to explain to me why she had been forced to shoot you—vague, shattered babble about your having made her feel evil, shameful pleasure… and something about the rape… and some incoherent business about eyes squirting like grapes from their skins—quite suddenly she turned on me, shrieking and beating her fists against my chest. She accused me of stealing her place in the world! Of being born a man, invulnerable to rape, when it was she who should have been born the man! After all, she was older! She screamed out at the injustice of it! And she used words I didn’t know she had ever heard, words that would have made a dock worker blush. She struggled violently against my efforts to hold her in my arms, and she tried to hit me in the face with her fists, all the while sobbing, ‘I should have been the brother! I should have been the boy!’ Then, worn out and empty of hate, she sagged in my arms. And when she lifted her head and I saw her face, stained with spent fury, the eyes wild and haunted, I knew… I knew the flood of memories had passed and were lost forever from the light. Katya was gone. As Hortense had gone before her. She wrenched herself free from my grasp and ran up to the house. Katya was gone, Montjean… gone.” Tears filled Katya’s eyes and her lips trembled. She was weeping silently for the lost Hortense; and Paul was weeping for the lost Katya.
   I remained silent until the tears stopped flowing and she sat, staring out across the overgrown garden, her lashes still wet, indifferent to the tear streaks on her soft cheeks.
   “You followed her to the house, Paul?”
   She looked at me with an expression between bewilderment and annoyance, as though surprised to find me there. “What?”
   “You followed Katya to the house?”
   She nodded. “Yes… yes…” She drew a long, fatigued sigh.
   “And…?”
   “It occurred to me in a flash that she might find Father’s body, with his face all… missing, you know. The shock of it might… Oh, Jesus! I burst into the house after her, calling her name. As I ran into the hall, I saw her. She was standing on the landing of the stairs. In her hand was the pistol I had brought up to Father’s room when I carried him to his bed. She looked down at me… cold yet desperate eyes. And, Montjean—Jean-Marc—she had done something very strange, very frightening….” She stopped speaking abruptly, and she sat stiff and unmoving.
   The sun had slipped low in the sky, and patterns of leaf dapple over her face covered one eye with a patch of dark shadow, while the other stared dully ahead. The vision scurried eddies of fear down my spine.
   “What was it, Paul? What had she done that was so frightening?”
   She frowned and shook her head, her eyes clouded and confused. “I don’t understand it. I looked down on her and realized that… that she had somehow…”
   “You looked down on her? But she was on the landing, wasn’t she, and you were below in the hall.”
   “No. No. You see, that was the hideous thing she had done! She had somehow…”
   Her eyes searched the space before them, as though trying to see the events again, trying to understand them.
   “She… she burst into the hall, calling out her own name. Then she saw me standing on the landing, and she looked up at me with fear in her eyes, as though I were going to harm her! And, Montjean… she was wearing my clothes. She was pretending to be me! Why, she even—Christ, it was ghastly!—she had even cut her hair! I had just come from finding Father on his bed… horrible… ugly. I had the pistol in my hand, and she stared up at it, as though I intended to shoot her. Then suddenly it became clear to me what she was trying to do. Poor dear! Poor lost Katya was trying to find someplace to hide, someplace to flee to. Years before, she had learned the trick of surviving by dying. She had become Katya, and allowed the soiled, ruined Hortense to die. But now she could no longer be Katya. She knew now that Katya was mad, that Katya had killed the young man in Paris, that Katya had shot you down in the garden because you had made her feel disgusting, shameful pleasure! And when we were children, we used to play tricks on visitors, pretending both to be the same person, to be two places at once. Poor Katya was trying desperately to survive! She was trying to become me! She had no other place to go! But what was to happen to me, Montjean? If Katya became me, where was I to go? For God’s sake! It wasn’t my fault that I had been born the boy!
   “I stood on the staircase looking down at her, horrified that she had changed into my clothes and cut her hair. Then a terrible thought occurred to me. Dreading what I knew I would discover, I looked down at my clothes. I was wearing her white dress! How had she done that to me, Montjean? How is it possible? Then I reached up and touched my hair. It was her hair, Montjean! Her hair! She had made my hair long and had done it up in a bun, so everyone would think I was the woman! I didn’t want to be the woman! I didn’t want to be raped! My eyes throbbed, as though someone were pressing his fingers into them! No! No! Then, something became perfectly clear to both of us at the same instant. There was no place in the world for both of us. Only one of us could survive. We loved one another. We were brother and sister. But only one of us could survive. She raised the gun slowly and pointed it at Katya. I looked up at her. I understood what had to be. I smiled and nodded. I looked down at her. I understood what had to be. I smiled and nodded. Then she… then I squeezed the trigger and… shot herself.”
   Katya pressed her fingertips against her forehead hard, until the fingers trembled with strain and white dents appeared on her brow; then she raked her fingers back through her cropped, matted hair.

   “Oh, God, Montjean! I took her head into my lap. She looked so strange and pitiful with her hair cut short in that way. Her eyelids fluttered and she smiled up at me faintly. Then there was a terrible gurgling sound at the back of her throat! I pressed her face into my chest and begged her not to die! I kissed her! Then she stiffened… there was foam on her lips! And she…” Katya’s eyes searched mine, desperately seeking understanding. “Poor Hortense was finally dead, Montjean. But… but… I couldn’t leave her there, of course. People would come. They would see poor Katya looking silly and queer in my clothes with her hair cut like a man’s. They would say ugly things about her. I had to carry her up to her room. It was so hard! She was so heavy! Limp and boneless, in a way. I managed to put her onto her bed, and I made her look nice again. She was a handsome woman, you know. Not beautiful perhaps, but handsome. I put one of her dresses over her so she would look nice again. It wasn’t until I passed her mirror that I recalled with a sickening shock what she had done to me. The dress she had made me wear was all stained with her blood. And my hair…! I changed into my own clothes and cut my hair—I don’t think I did a very good job of it. After all, old fellow, I’m not a barber. Then I stepped back out into the hall and… you were there. You were alive! Oh, Jean-Marc, I am so happy you’re alive! I’m so happy she didn’t kill you!”
   The tears flowed down her cheeks. I took her into my arms and held her tightly, my eyes squeezed shut, my cheek pressed against hers, as her body racked with painful sobs.
   In her final struggle to remember as Katya and to understand as Paul she had spoken an unearthly dialogue, her voice shifting in and out of the ugly guttural rasp that was Paul. The effort had sapped her strength, and now she rested her weight against me as the sobs resided and her panicked breathing slowed and calmed. I held her and rocked her gently in my arms. One of her tears found its way to the corner of my mouth. I can taste the warm salt to this day.
   Then she stiffened in my arms and pulled away, and when I looked into her amused, metallic eyes, I knew she was Paul now… and forever.
   She turned from me and smoothed down her hair with the palm of her hand. She wiped the tears from her cheeks with quick, impatient gestures; then she laughed three mirthless notes and turned to settle her cool, superior eyes on me. “Taken all in all, old fellow, we’ve had quite an exciting couple of hours around here. Pity you missed it.”
   The hoarse voice, the smirking tone, the sardonic shallow smile in the eyes. Yes, Katya was quite, quite gone.
   I took a deep breath and spoke, my voice husky with tears. “What… what are you going to do now, Paul?”
   “Oh, come, old fellow, what options have I? It’s obvious that Katya’s suicide will be set to my account. After all, let’s face it, it’s not the most believable story in the world. And it wouldn’t be the guillotine for me. Nothing that tidy.” She chuckled. “I’m sure that if Katya were here she’d be unable to resist a pun about ‘losing one’s head.’ No, it wouldn’t be the guillotine for me. And the prospect of my wallowing in the filth of some asylum is beneath consideration. Imagine the quality of the conversation—to say nothing of the food!” She chuckled again. “No, no, it won’t do at all.” She mounted the two steps to the summerhouse, took up the pistol from the wicker chair, then sat in Paul’s sprawling, careless way. “Fortunately, gentlemen of my class have prescribed responses to awkward situations of this kind. Katya was right about the advantages of being a man in this society. Now I really think you should be on your way, Doctor. You’re looking a little pallid. Loss of blood will do that, you know, even to the notoriously full-blooded Basques.”
   I knew that she—he was right. There was no other way. Katya living on as a spectacle in some asylum? Like Mlle M.? No. Oh, no. And the fact was, Katya was already dead, lying on her bed up in the house.
   Drained, adrift in a vertigo of hopelessness, I turned to leave.
   But I was arrested by Paul’s lazy drawl. “Oh, by the way, here’s a little something Katya wanted me to give you.” He tugged a small silk drawstring bag from his coat pocket. “They’re yours, I believe.”
   “No, not mine. They were gifts to Katya.”
   “Oh, really?” He examined one of the pebbles with mild disrelish. “Well, no one could ever accuse you of being a mad spendthrift when it comes to gift-giving.”
   “No, I suppose not. Paul? Would you do me a favor?”
   “So long as it’s something slight, old fellow.”
   “Would you keep those pebbles for me? Just hold them in your hand… for remembrance?”
   His metallic eyes softened for just a second; then he grinned. “If that would amuse you… why not?”
   “Thank you.” I turned and walked up the overgrown path.
   The sun was setting in a russet flush along the horizon as I drove the trap down past the ruined garden wall. The poplars lining the lane were suffused with an amber afterglow that seemed to rise from the earth. The mare’s ears flickered at the sound of the shot.

   Envoi
   I remember once describing the Basques to Katya as men who never forgive. Never.
   During the course of my medical practice, fate delivered a slightly wounded rapist into my hands.
   He did not survive treatment.
   Salies-les-Bains
   August 1938

The Summer of Katya

Rodney Whitaker

The Summer of Katya
by Trevanian

   For Diane



   Salies-les-Bains
   August 1938
   Every writer who has dealt with that last summer before the Great War has felt compelled to comment on the uncommon perfection of the weather: the endless days of ardent blue skies across which fair-weather clouds toiled lazily, the long lavender evenings freshened by soft breezes, the early mornings of birdsong and slanting yellow sunlight. From Italy to Scotland, from Berlin to the valleys of my native Basse Pyrйnйes, all of Europe shared an exceptional period of clear, delicious weather. It was the last thing they were to share for four terrible years—save for the mud and agony, hate and death of the war that marked the boundary between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, between the Age of Grace and the Era of Efficiency.
   Many who have described that summer claim to have sensed something ominous and terminal in the very excellence of the season, a last flaring up of the guttering candle, a Hellenistic burst of desperate exuberance before the death of a civilization, a final, almost hysterical, moment of laughter and joy for the young men who were to die in the trenches. I confess that my own memory of that last July, assisted to a modest degree by notes and sketches in my journal, carries no hint that I viewed the exquisite weather as an ironic jest of Fate. Perhaps I was insensitive to the omens, young as I was, filled with the juices of life, and poised eagerly on the threshold of my medical career.
   These last words provoke a wry smile, as only the conventions of language allow me to describe the quarter century I have passed as a bachelor doctor in a small Basque village as a “medical career.” To be sure, the bright hardworking young man that I was had every reason to hope he was on the first step of a journey to professional success, although he might have drawn some hint of a more limited future from the humiliatingly trivial tasks he was assigned by his sponsor and patron, Doctor Hippolyte Gros, who emphasized his assistant’s subordinate position in dozens of ways, both subtle and bold, not the least effective of which was reminding patients that I was indeed a full-fledged doctor, despite my apparent youth and palpable lack of experience.
   “Doctor Montjean will attend to writing out your prescription,” he would tell a patient with a benevolent smile. “You may have every confidence in him. Oh, the ink may still be wet on his certificate, but he is well versed in all the most modern approaches to healing, both of body and mind.” This last gibe was aimed at my fascination with the then new and largely mistrusted work of Doctor Freud and his followers. Doctor Gros would pat the hand of his patient (all of whom were women of a certain age, as he specialized in the “discomforts” associated with menopause) and assure her that he was honored to have an assistant who had studied in Paris. The widened eyes and tone of awe with which he said Paris were designed to suggest, in broad burlesque, that a simple provincial doctor, such as he, felt obliged to be humble before a brilliant young man from the capital who had everything to recommend him—save perhaps experience, compassion, wisdom, understanding, and success.
   Lest I create too unflattering a portrait of Doctor Gros, let me admit that it was kind of him to invite me to be his summer assistant, as I was fresh out of medical school, penniless, without any prospects for purchasing a practice, and burdened by a most uncomplimentary report of my year of internship at the mental institution of Passy. However, far from showing Doctor Gros the gratitude he had a right to expect, I courted his displeasure by confessing to him that I considered his area of specialization to be founded on old wives’ tales, and his profitable summer clinic to be little more than a luxury resort for women with more leisure than common sense. In sharing these observations with him, I am sure I believed myself to be admirably open and honest for, with the callous assurance of youth, I often mistook insensitivity for frankness. It is little wonder that he occasionally retaliated against my callow self-confidence with thrusts at my inexperience and my peculiar absorption with the darker workings of the mind.
   Indeed, one day in the clinic when I had been holding forth on the ethical parallels between withholding treatment from the sick and giving it to the healthy, he said to me, “You have no doubt wondered, Montjean, why I chose you to assist me this summer. Possibly you came to the conclusion that I was staggered by your academic accomplishments and impressed by the altruism revealed by your year of unpaid service at Passy. Well, there was some of that, to be sure. Then too, there was the fact that you were born in this part of France, and your dark Basque good looks are an asset to a clinic catering to women of a certain age and uncertain appetites. After all, having a Basque boy fiddle with their bits lends to the local color. But foremost among your qualities was your willingness to work cheap, which I admired because humility is an attractive and rare quality in a young doctor. However, little by little, I am coming to the view that what I mistook for humility was, in fact, an accurate evaluation of your worth.”
   And, the truth be told, I wasn’t of all that much value to him, as there was not really enough work at the clinic to occupy two doctors. My principal worth was as insurance against his falling ill for a day or two, and as freedom for him to take the occasional day off—days he implied were devoted to romantic preoccupations. For Doctor Gros had something of a reputation as a rake and a devil with the women who were his patients. He never boasted openly of his conquests to the worthies of Salies who were his companions over a few glasses each evening in one of the arcade cafйs around the central square. Instead he relied on the silent smile, the shrug, the weak gesture of protest, to establish his reputation, not only as a romancer of potency, but as a man possessed of great discretion and a finely tuned sense of honor.
   Nor did Doctor Gros’s particularly advantageous position in the stream of sexual opportunity engender the jealousy one might have expected among his peers, for he was protected from their envy by a fully deserved reputation as the ugliest man in Gascony, perhaps in all of France. His was a uniquely thoroughgoing ugliness embracing both broad plan and minute detail, an ugliness the total of which was greater than the sum of the parts, an ugliness to which each feature contributed its bit, from the bulbous veiny nose, to the blotched and pitted complexion, well warted and stained, to the slack meaty mouth, to the flapping wattles, to the gnarled, irregular ears, to the undershot chin overbalanced by a beetling brow. Only his eyes, glittering and intelligent within their sunken, rheumy sockets, escaped the general aesthetic holocaust. But withal there was a peculiar attraction to his face, a fascination at the abandon with which Nature can embrace ruin, that lured one’s glance again and again to his features only to have the gaze deflected by self-consciousness.
   Doctor Gros was by far the wittiest and best-educated man in Salies, but the audience for his pompous, rather purple style of monologue were the dull-minded men who controlled the spa community: the owners of the hotel-restaurants, the manager of the casino, the village lawyer, the banker, all of whom felt a certain reluctant debt to the doctor, for it was his clinic that was the principal attraction for the summer tourist/patients who were the economic foundation of the town. Still—even though Profit occupies so dominant a position in the moral order of the French bourgeois mentality that vague impulses towards fair play and decency are easily held in rein—it is possible that the more prudish of Salies’s merchants might have found Doctor Gros’s cavalier treatment of the lady patients offensive, had these pampered, well-to-do women been genuinely ill. But in fact they were robust middle-class specimens whose only physical distress was having attained an age at which fashionable society allowed them to flap and flutter over “women’s problems,” the clinical details of which they whispered to one another with that appalled delectation later generations would reserve for sex. So it was that I alone found Doctor Gros’s sexual hinting and double entendres medically unethical and socially distasteful, a view that my youthful addiction to moral simplism required me to express. Looking back, I wonder that Doctor Gros put up with my self-assured censure at all, but the peculiar fact was that he rather seemed to like me, in a gruff sort of way. He took impish delight in outraging my tidy and compact sense of ethics. Also, I was in a position, by virtue of education, to catch his puns and comic images that went over the heads of his merchant-minded cronies. But I believe the principal reason he was fond of me was nostalgic egotism: he saw in me, in both my ambitions and limitations, the young man he had been before time and fate reduced his brilliance to mere table wit, and eroded the scope of his aspirations to the dimensions of a profitable small-town clinic.
   Perhaps this is why his reaction to my attitude of moral superiority was limited to giving me only the most trivial tasks to perform. And, in fact, I was not all that distressed at being relegated to the role of an elevated pharmacist, for I had just finished years of grinding work and study that had drained mind and body and was in need of a lazy summer with time on my hands, with freedom to wander through the quaint, slightly shoddy resort village or to loaf on the banks of the sparkling Gave, overarched by ancient trees and charming stone bridges. I wanted time to rest, to dream, to write.
   Ah yes, write. For at that time in my life I felt capable of everything. Having attempted nothing, I had no sense of my limitations; having dared nothing, I knew no boundaries to my courage. During the years of fatigue and dulling rote in medical school, I had daydreamed of a future confected of two careers: that of the brilliant and caring doctor and that of the inspired and inspiring poet. And why not? I was an avid and sensitive reader, and I made the common error of assuming that being a responsive reader indicated latent talent as a writer, as though being a gourmand was but a short step from being a chef. Indeed, my first interest in the pioneer work of Doctor Freud sprang, not from a concern for persons wounded in their collisions with reality, but from my personal curiosity about the nature of creativity and the springs of motivation.
   So it was that, for several hours a day throughout that indolent, radiant summer, I wandered into the countryside with my notebook, or sat alone at an out-of-the-way cafй, sipping an aperitif and holding imagined conversations with important and terribly impressed lions of the literary world, or I lounged by the banks of the Gave, notebook open, sketching romantic impressions, my lofty poetic intent inevitably withering to a kind of breathless shattered prose in the process of being recorded—a dissipation that I was sure I would learn to avoid once I had mastered the “tricks” of writing.
   Then, too, there was the matter of love. As the reader might suspect, the expansive young man that I was had no doubt but that he was capable of a great love… a staggering love. I was, after all, twenty-five years old, brimming with health, a devourer of novels, fertile of imagination. It is no surprise that I was ripe for romance.
   Ripe for romance? Is that not only the self-conscious and sensitive young man’s way of saying he was heavy with passion? Is not, perhaps, romance only the fiction by means of which the tender-minded negotiate their lust?
   No, not quite. I am painfully aware that the young man I used to be was callow, callous, self-confident, and egotistic. There is no doubt he was heavy with passion. But, to give the poor devil his due, he was also ripe for romance.
   I slipped into a comfortable, rather lazy, routine of life, doing all that Doctor Gros demanded of me and nothing more. A more ambitious person—or a less blindly confident one—would have filled his time with study and self-improvement, for any dispassionate analysis of my future prospects would have revealed them to be most uncertain. I was, after all, without family and without means; I was in debt for my education; and I had no inclination to waste my talents on some impoverished rural community. Yet I was content to laze away my days, resting myself in preparation for some unknown prospect or adventure that I was sure, without the slightest evidence, lay just around the corner. As events turned out, I would have wasted any time spent in work and study; for the war came that autumn and I was called up immediately. Romantically—and quite stupidly—I joined the army as a simple soldier.
   Four years of mud and trenches, stench, fear, brutalizing boredom. Twice wounded, once seriously enough to limit my physical activities for the rest of my life. Four years recorded in my memory as one endless blur of horror and disgust. Even to this day I am choked with nausea and rage when I stand among my fellow veterans in the graveyard of my village and recite the names of those “mort pour la France.”
   Why did I submit myself to the butchery of the trenches when I might have served in the echelons as a medical officer? Even the most rudimentary knowledge of Doctor Freud would suggest that I was pursuing a death wish… as indeed I was. I knew this at the time, but that knowledge neither freed nor sustained me, as I had assumed self-understanding would, in my sophomoric grasp of the unconscious.
   I am rushing ahead of my tale—beyond it, really. But then, life is neither linear nor tidy. Too, there is a direct link between my being heavy with passion that long delicious summer and my being possessed of a death wish that autumn. The link is Katya.
   Katya…
   Three days ago I returned to Salies for the first time in twenty-four years, the first time since I left the army and came back to assume the shabby practice of the aging doctor of my native village. Four years in the trenches had pulverized my fine aspirations; I no longer yearned for fame or dreamed of excitement; I clung thankfully to the peace and inner silence I found in the featureless rounds of a country practice. The years passed unnoticed and unremembered, and one autumn morning I found myself suddenly forty-five years old. It was a time for weighing youthful hopes against mature accomplishment, for it was quite certain that I had by then done all I was ever going to do. Sitting alone at my desk that evening of my forty-fifth birthday I asked that least original of introspective questions: Where had it all gone? And the somewhat less banal question: What, after all, had it been?
   My heart swollen with nostalgia, with a pain akin to remorse, I decided to return to Salies and look for the threads of my life there, where the fabric had been torn apart. I had an impulse to drop everything and rush off that evening, but there is a heavy irony in the way prosaic life refuses to accommodate the theatrical rhythms of fiction, and it was another three years before I was able to arrange a vacation and come for a fortnight to Salies.
   I have been here for three days now; wandering, walking alone. I even purchased a child’s notebook for the purpose of recording memories of that summer. At this moment I am writing in that notebook as I sit beside the flowing Gave beneath an ancient overhanging tree that I remember from my first summer here. Externally, Salies has changed very little during the intervening quarter century; the same Second Empire fancywork on the faзades of the casino and the public baths, the same self-conscious quaintness in the decor of the restaurants. But a certain diminished melancholy can be felt in long overdue repainting and in postponed repairs; for Salies fell out of fashion when it became no longer acceptable for a woman to enjoy a comfortable middle age, cushioned by rounds of social trivia and routines of self-cosseting. Nowadays such women are driven by both self-image and externally imposed ideals to play forever at the burlesque of youth, plying their cosmetics with trowels, and panting feverishly after the phantoms of fun, purpose, and fulfillment.
   Still the hydropathic branch of French medicine is nothing if not responsive to the vagaries of economics and fashion, and it was not long after women of a certain age stopped coming to Salies that its water was discovered to contain just that combination of temperature, salts, and trace minerals that made it sovereign for the treatment of severely retarded children. The casino and the charming little hotels have become establishments for the year-round care of such unfortunates as are kept, for their own good, well away from the quotidian lives of their discomfited parents. And today, down streets where once pairs of modish ladies paraded their gowns of mauve or ashes-of-rose, queues of gawking bland-faced children slap and stumble along under the control of large, disinterested matrons who bring them daily to the baths. There they plash about in the tepid waters or gag and grimace as they swallow their daily dosage.
   But it is not this change of tone and clientele that makes it difficult for me to record my impressions and memories of that summer before the war. Indeed, Salies has been spared the architectural blemishes of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties that have scarred most resort villages, protected by its fall from fashion and subsequent lack of growth and modernization, and the unchanged physical surroundings tempt and prompt my recall, each remembered event dislodging in turn another incident, another sound, another image from the deep lagan of my memory. And there is another, rather frightening, bridge between this time and that summer nearly quarter of a century past. Now as then, there are whispers and rumors of impending war. There is a kind of melancholy excitement in the air, a timid hysteria, a low-grade fever of patriotism. Plans and projects are suspended; and there is an ambience of hopelessness in the brave talk and awkward swagger of the young men who are half expecting to be mobilized, despite everyone’s confidence in General Maginot’s impregnable line.
   But despite the physical and emotional parallels between today and that distant summer, I find it difficult to express my memories lucidly. The problem is not in the remembering; it is in the recording; for while I recall each note clearly, they play a false melody when I string them together. And it is not only the intervening years that distort the sounds and images; it is the fact that the events occurred on the other side of the Great War, beyond the gulf of experience and pain that separates two centuries, two cultures. Those of us whose lives are draped across that war find their youths deposited on the shore of a receding, almost alien, continent where life was lived at a different tempo and, more important, in a different timbre. The things we did and said, our motives and methods, had different implications from those they now have; therefore, it is possible for a description of those things to be completely accurate without being at all truthful.
   But I have promised myself that I would revisit, touch, and handle all the memories of that summer and Katya, and I must do this, although I am not at all confident that I can convert those memories into meaning.