We discovered Katya and Monsieur Treville among the throng collected in the village square, his urbane clothes and her white dress and shoes setting them apart. They were standing in the front of a ring of onlookers around the performers of the pastoral of Robert le Diable, Katya smiling on with affectionate interest, as though the performers were friends of hers, and her father watching intensely, occasionally scribbling notes with a pencil stub on a pad of paper. The Devil and the Horse engaged in off-color buffoonery while the Hero performed the Dance of the Glass, leaping with flashing entrechats and landing, balanced on his soft dancing shoes, on the rim of a thick glass that had been filled with wine and set on the stones before him. Twice the glass spilled and once it shattered, but each time it was replaced with shouts of encouragement until the dancer had effected three sauts in a row without spilling the wine, which accomplishment was rewarded with roars of applause and loud whinnies of the famous cri basque from exuberant onlookers, many of whom had already managed to get their noses bent with wine, to use the local phrase.
   “The wine represents blood, I assume,” Monsieur Treville muttered to me. “Perhaps sacramental blood. And I suppose the Devil is one of the ancient, pre-Christian earth deities. Can you provide any insight into the symbolism of the Horse, Doctor?”
   “I’m afraid not, sir. And I doubt that anyone here could. It is one of those Basque rituals that is performed simply because it has always been performed, and no one has ever questioned its meaning.”
   “Perhaps the Horse represents fertility,” Monsieur Treville suggested. “You see how its chases after the Maiden, who slaps at it and tries to hide herself behind the Devil?”
   I nodded absently, more interested in watching the delight and fascination play across Katya’s features than in constructing a symbolic substructure for a ritual I had seen performed so often.
   “What are they saying?” Monsieur Treville asked me.
   “Who, sir?”
   “The Horse and the Devil, with all their shouting and bantering.”
   I shrugged, and perhaps my cheeks reddened a little. It had never occurred to me to take any note of it as a boy, but the Basque badinage between the two performers was boldly bawdy, having to do with sexual competence and the size of members. I glanced uneasily towards Katya and cleared my throat. “Ah… perhaps you are right, sir. Perhaps the Horse does represent fertility.”
   “Hm-m. And what is that large object with the knob on the end that the Maiden keeps trying to take from the Hero?”
   I looked for help from Paul, but he smiled blandly back and said, “Yes, Jean-Marc, do tell us. What do you make the object out to be?”
   Katya lowered her eyes and smiled the faintest conceivable smile.
   “I… ah… to tell the truth, I never thought about it, sir. Say! What do you think the person who dances on the glass represents?”
   Monsieur Treville shrugged. “Both hero and clown… could easily represent mankind. And how appropriate, if you consider it for a moment.”
   “So,” Paul said, “if I read the profound symbolic significance of all this correctly, it is the gripping story of Mankind dancing on a glass of blood while the Devil chats with Fertility, and the Maiden tries to steal the Hero’s—excuse me, Doctor, what did you say that was?”
   With a final shrill crescendo of the txitsu flute and a rattle of the stick drum, the performance was over, and the crowd applauded wildly and surrounded the performers to treat them to a txikiteo. I had used the Basque word in explaining where the crowd was bringing the players, and Katya asked me to translate it.
   “A txikiteo is a tour of the bars, with a glass of wine taken at each one.”
   “And how many such places would you estimate there are here in the village?”
   “Twenty-five or thirty, counting the temporary buvettes set up in front of every shop.”
   “My goodness, Jean-Marc. And they will accomplish a tour of thirty bars?”
   I laughed. “It isn’t the accomplishment that matters, it’s the devotion with which the effort is undertaken. The Basques have few native attributes beyond their capacity for dance and hard work, but they rise to the heroic when it comes to drinking at a fкte.”
   “I have always heard them spoken of as sober-minded people—even dour, if you do not find that word offensive,” Monsieur Treville said.
   “Indeed they are. Most of these men are farmers and shepherds. And they work hard and long every day of the year, save for the village fкte and the day of the marriage of their children. On those occasions, however, they drink and dance. And they take their vices every bit as seriously as their virtues.”
   Night descended upon us quickly, as it does in the mountains, and the crowd in the village square thickened until it was impossible to move without pressing against people. Katya and I soon lost sight of the other two, and I felt obliged to keep my arm around her waist to prevent us from being separated. Colored paper lanterns strung across the square were lit with smoldering punks by young men standing on the shoulders of other young men, and there was much horseplay and toppling and staggering and laughter as they jousted and tugged at one another to see which young man could remain on the shoulders of his teammate the longest. One or two small fights broke out, quickly stanched by friends pulling the combatants apart and taking them off to have a glass or two, but no real bagarres basques broke out, as surely they would before the night was over. There would be at least one great melee of battle, with the young men using their belts and buckles as weapons. And there would be cuts and welts and a few broken noses and chipped teeth. After all, what would a fкte be without its bagarre? A feeble and shoddy thing.
   “And will there be a bagarre tonight?” Katya asked.
   “Oh, probably. Does that prospect frighten you?”
   “Not at all.” Her eyes shone. “It’s exciting.”
   Accordion, flute, and drum struck up a traditional tune, and there was a pulse in the throng drawing it towards the center of the square. People pushed back to form a circle through which a few daring couples percolated to begin the dancing. Katya and I found ourselves on the inner rim of the circle, and she pressed my arm forward.
   “You want to dance?” I asked.
   “Oh, yes. Of course!”
   “Do you know this dance?” It was a simple form of the Kax Karot, which begins with couples, then develops into a line dance with all the young people leaping into the air on cue, the men with their arms around the waists of the women on each side, leaping as high as they can, making the women cry out for fear of losing their balance.
   “I never saw it before,” Katya said. “But I’m sure I can do it.” She rehearsed the simple steps in place, making a demure little jump at the appropriate beat. “Yes, I can do it. Come.”
   “No. Wait a minute. We’ll join in later.” I didn’t bother to explain the complexities of good form that regarded the first girls to enter the dance as a bit brazen and forward, to avoid which stigma they held back, coy and complaining, and had to be dragged out by their young men or pushed forward by giggling girl friends, their cheeks flushed with mock shame and real pleasure. It would certainly not have done for a non-Basque woman in a rather formal white dress to be one of the first dancers.
   As I glanced over the crowd, my eye fell on the five young Parisians who had nearly run us down in their motorcar. They stood directly across the ring from us, the young women watching the first dancers with interest, but the languid attitudes of the two young men proclaiming their disdain for this rustic merrymaking.
   For fully half of the first dance, there were fewer than ten couples in the ring, most of them newly married or soon-to-be-married, for this status freed the women from any implications of being brazen or showing off. Then a middle-aged farmer a bit bent with wine pushed his chubby wife out into the ring to the cheers and hoots of their friends, and he began to dance around her while she hid her face in her hands. When she gave up her show of coy embarrassment and began to dance with a will, the signal was received by all the girls that they might dance without damage to reputation, and instantly the square was alive with shouting, laughing dancers who peeled forward from the ring of onlookers, making that ring larger by their departure from it. It was then that I pressed Katya forward and we danced, unnoticed in the throng.
   The trio of the band ended its first melody and immediately entered upon the next, so as to catch the dancers before they could return to the circle of bystanders. Couples linked up into lines of four or six, then the segments combined and lengthened until the dancers were formed in two long irregular queues facing one another. Two skip steps forward, two back, then a leap as high as one could, the women landing with shrieks and a billow of skirts. I was surprised at how easily the forgotten dance came back to me. Perhaps it is true that the impulse to dance—particularly the vigorous sauts basques—is a genetic trait of the Basque male. The man who shared Katya’s waist with me was a strong shepherd who could leap as high as his belt, and the woman around whom I had my other arm was a plump girl of ruddy complexion and surprising agility. Soon the center of our line was jumping notably higher than the ends and even higher than the people immediately in front of us, so we chided them about their lack of strength and will. With grins and nods, the men opposite accepted our challenge and began to carry their complaining partners higher and higher in the leap, and the joyous shrieks of the women took on a note of real fear lest they fall to the stones of the square.
   Catching the mood of the challenge, the band began to play faster and faster, and the leader laughed and called out for us to give it our all. Older and less athletic people dropped away, panting and shaking their heads, and soon each of the lines contained no more than a dozen couples, with Katya and I in the center of our team. We panted and our legs trembled, but each line was determined not to give in before the other. The tempo increased. I was badly out of condition and was on the verge of dropping out when both lines simultaneously began to cry out to the band Naikua! Naikua! (That’s enough!). With a final taunt, the band played a last verse at an impossibly fast tempo, and the dance ended with all the participants stumbling, their rhythm shattered, in a panting jumble.
   There was laughter and shouts, and men clapping one another on the back, and the strong young shepherd who had shared Katya with me gave her a vigorous hug and complimented her endurance and strength in the reluctant way of the Basque… not all that bad for an outlander!
   Gasping for breath, my lungs aching, I led Katya through the circle of onlookers to a quieter part of the square near the buildings and out of the light of the paper lanterns. My legs were so wobbly that I had to lean against the stone faзade to regain my strength.
   “Wonderful!” she said, her face aglow with the excitement and joy of the dance.
   “Yes…” I tried to catch my breath and swallow through a parched throat. “…Wonderful. But I should warn you that… I may die of a heart attack any second now.”
   “Oh, rubbish!” She touched my moist forehead with her handkerchief. “It is true that the men do most of the work. But that’s as it should be.”
   I nodded, unable to speak. When the pulse stopped throbbing in my temples I asked her if she would like something to drink.
   “No, thank you,” she said offhandedly; then she recognized my worn and parched condition and amended, “Yes, that would be nice. Thank you.”
   Just at that moment, there was a clatter of the stick drum and a twittering shriek of the txitsu flute. The throng hushed and everyone in the square and at the buvettes froze in place and turned towards a narrow alleyway across the way.
   “What is it?” Katya asked in a whisper.
   “The Drowned Virgin. Watch.”
   A firework tube was struck near the mouth of the alleyway, and its flaring, sputtering light turned the walls of the buildings a vivid red. Then the stick drum took up a funereal beat to the tempo of which a line of costumed mourners emerged from the gap between buildings and began their slow march across the square, the crowd soberly parting to make way for them. First came two children robed all in white, their faces covered with a chalky masklike makeup, their eyes and mouths accented in black. Behind them strode a richly costumed man (presumably the brother of the accused woman) dragging heavy penitential chains that clattered over the cobbles. Next came two young men dressed in rags and patches, each carrying a heavy stone with a hole bored through it, and through the holes were passed knotted ropes like those used to weigh the accused woman down when she was thrown into the river. Finally came the Virgin, a girl of fifteen or so, chosen for beauty from among the girls of the district, borne on the shoulders of six young men, three to the right, three to the left, walking in exact chain step. She lay stiff on their shoulders, her head thrown back and her hair falling to the waist of the lead bearer. Her white dress of gossamer material had been soaked in water, and it clung most revealingly to her plump body, her nipples dark beneath the fabric. Her long hair had been drenched with oil and combed out in a stiff, inhuman way, and drops of the oil dripped on the cobbles.
   The swaying line of mourners passed very close to us, and at the sight of the Drowned Virgin, Katya grasped my arm, her fingers digging into it. I felt her tremble.
   As the mourners approached the narrow alleyway directly opposite the one from which they had emerged, another red firework tube was struck, and they disappeared into a hell like the one from which they had materialized. For a prolonged moment, there was absolute silence.
   Then the men of the crowd broke into shrieks of the long, yapping cri basque that could chill the blood of those not used to it.
   Instantly, the band struck up another Kax Karot tune, and the dancing, the laughter, the drinking was all about us.
   “What does it mean?” Katya asked in a subdued voice.
   “Oh, nothing. Nothing at all. It’s just an ancient ritual. Shall I get us something to drink?”
   “No, don’t leave!” She held my arm tighter. Then, in a calmer voice, “Let’s dance. I want to dance.”
   I was sure my lungs would burst and my legs crumple beneath me by the time we came to the last frantic leaps of the Kax Karot and we were all laughing and clapping one another on the back. Katya had reacted to the stunning effect of the ritual of the Drowned Virgin with a vivacity more vibrant and life-embracing than before. There was, in fact, a kind of desperate energy in her dancing and laughter that made me a bit uneasy.
   Once again we took refuge in our little niche by the buildings, as I tried to regain my breath. “Too many years… of study in the big city…” I panted. “I’m not up to this. I must get something… to drink… or I shall die right here… unnoticed and unmourned.”
   She laughed. “Poor sickly thing. Oh, very well.”
   It was not customary for women to enter the bars, so I offered to leave her with her father or brother while I fought my way through the crowd to get something for us to drink.
   “Do you know where they are?”
   “No, but we’ll find them.” I began to search the throng over the heads of the people near us.
   “No, I’ll be perfectly fine right here.”
   “Alone?”
   “What harm could come to me? And if you’re concerned about my reputation, I have a feeling that a woman who is not Basque doesn’t have a reputation worth saving anyway.”
   I laughed and confessed that she was perceptive in her estimate of Basque views of outlanders, those poor creatures who lacked the touch of God. After only a moment of hesitation, I gave her hand a farewell squeeze and shouldered my way through the milling throng until I had gained the door of one of the cafйs in which all the tables were crowded with old men sitting before their glasses, their veined faces alight with drink and merriment. As I pressed towards the zinc bar I caught a glimpse of Monsieur Treville at a table, surrounded by aged Basque peasants. On the table was a nearly empty bottle of Izarra, that delicious, expensive, and very strong Basque liqueur that tastes of mountain flowers. It was evident that Monsieur Treville was buying the drinks and that the old Basque men were paying for his hospitality by responding to his questions about customs and traditions, each holding forth in his broken French until he was interrupted by contradictions and clarifications (both lengthy and irrelevant) by another of the men, for one of the devices in the devious Basque temperament is flooding the other fellow’s mind with scrupulously precise detail—concealing the true behind the factual. I thought to warn Monsieur Treville of the deceptive potency of Izarra, but he did not see me in the dense crowd, nor was their any point in calling out to him, as my voice would have been lost in the din and babble. Just as his table was blocked from my sight, I saw him catch the eye of the harassed waiter to order another bottle of Izarra, which gesture the old men greeted with sober nods. It was clearly the right and proper thing for an outlander to do. I knew that the old men would soon reach the point in their drinking at which it became obligatory to sing in their high, strained voices with their peculiar harmonies. I wondered with a smile if Monsieur Treville would join in.
   I was able to capture a glass of red for myself and a corked bottle of citronade for Katya, but I was pressed away from the bar before I could collect my change, and I had to make space for myself with an extended arm to be able to drink off my wine before the glass was jostled empty. It was the good, acrid, harsh wine I remembered, and it scratched away some of the dryness in my throat. Soon, by the natural and irresistible eddy of the throng, I found myself back outside the bar, without my change, but in possession of their glass—a fair enough exchange, as I doubted that Katya would prefer to drink her citronade from the bottle.
   The dancing was in full swing under the colored paper lanterns, and crocodiles of mischievous children linked hands and snaked in and out of the crowd, into the paths of dancers to pester and annoy their elders, who responded with laughs and half-hearted slaps at the backs of dodging heads. To avoid the heaviest tides of the throng I eased my way around the rim of the square close to the buildings, where the occasional drunk sought to relieve himself in a passageway, and pairs of young lovers found the haven of dark doorways. I was blocked for a time at one of the temporary buvettes set up before a shop, a simple pair of planks laid across two barrels where a man sloshed wine from a big bottle back and forth over rows of stout glasses until they were more or less full on the puddled planks. The man deftly caught the coin I tossed over the head of the person in front of me, and I reached around and snatched up a glass and emptied it in two swallows before replacing it on the planks to be refilled without the indignity of being washed in public

   “…Katya?” I heard the name through the medley of babble and music, and I looked around to discover Paul standing not far away in one of the doorways. “Where is Katya?” he shouted again, enunciating carefully over the din.
   I pointed in the direction I had left her; then I raised up the bottle of citronade to indicate why I had left her alone.
   He gestured for me to join him, and I pressed through the mass of people until I was beside him in the doorway. It was only then I realized he was standing with a young lady dressed in high fashion, quite out of keeping with the colorful handmade dresses of the Basque women. I recognized her as one of the girls who had been in the motorcar that had nearly overturned us back on the road. Paul put his good arm about her and hugged her to him a bit roughly as he made introductions. “Dr. Montjean, I would like you to meet Mlle… I assume you have a name, my dear?”
   “Of course I have a name,” she giggled.
   “Don’t tell it to me. Preserve the attractive mystery. Doctor, I would like to introduce Mlle Somebodyoranother, a ravishing bit of fluff without an idea in her little head.”
   The young woman tsked and coyly pushed at his chest with her gloved hand, the gesture affirming his evaluation of her intellectual capacities while it revealed that she was a bit tipsy. She had one of those pretty, vacant faces that conceal nothing, as there is nothing to be concealed. Small round eyes, up-tipped nose, pert mouth, full rosy cheeks—one of the decorative types that does not wear well, but which is happily never required to. It was evident that she was smitten by Paul’s undeniable good looks and his smooth patter of rakish nonsense.
   “Delighted,” I said uncertainly.
   “Enchanted,” she said in a thin breathy voice with the accent of the north.
   “Mlle Nobody is visiting us from the great world of Paris,” Paul explained. “She and a company of friends have borrowed the handsome motorcar of one of their rich fathers to make this trek into the hinterlands from the relatively civilized outpost of Biarritz. Their trip here was dusty and uneventful, save for a little fun they had hectoring local rustics along the way by frightening their horses… isn’t that right, Mlle Whocares?”
   She giggled, obviously not recognizing Paul and me.
   “And that fellow over there,” Paul made a vague gesture towards an athletic-looking young man glaring at us from the shelter of the next doorway, “he was the driver of the vehicle in question. We may also assume he had anticipated being Mlle Nothing’s escort—if not more—and at this moment he is smoldering with jealousy in a most gratifying way. Isn’t that so, you insipid little charmer?” He hugged her to his side, and she rolled her eyes at me as though asking if ever in my born days I had met the likes of this outrageous rogue.
   I kept my face set in a smile as I asked, “Will there be trouble?”
   “If I have any luck at all, there will.”
   “Remember your shoulder.”
   He laughed. “My dear fellow, a kick-boxer uses his shoulders only to shrug, after it’s all over.”
   “Shall I stay close by?”
   “And spoil my fun? I’m beginning to enjoy myself for the first time in several years, aren’t I, Mlle Featherhead?” He kissed her cheek, and I could almost hear the young Parisian man grind his teeth.
   “Do you think I could manage this dance?” Paul asked.
   Another Kax Karot was just beginning to form its confronting lines out in the square. “I don’t see why not. It’s quite simple,” I said.
   “Good! Come, Echobrain, let’s dance!” And Paul dragged his adoring bit of fluff out into the throng.
   As I pressed on towards the place where I had left Katya, the young man from Paris caught up with me and clapped his heavy hand on my shoulder.
   “Sir?” I asked, turning around and gripping my bottle of citronade by the neck, for the fellow was bigger than I and much bigger than Paul.
   “Who was that man?” he demanded.
   “Which man?” I asked gazing blandly over the crowd. “There are rather many.”
   “The one you were talking with, damn it!”
   “Oh-h, him. I haven’t the slightest idea. He was asking if I had come across any snot-nosed Parisian dandies at the fкte, and I told him that I doubted any such would dare show his face here.” I smiled broadly and held his eyes with mine mockingly, though I should have been ashamed to revert so quickly to the infantile pugnacious ways of the Basque.
   The young man glared at me for a second; then he tossed his head haughtily as though it were beneath his dignity to bother with me, and he departed.
   When I had edged around the square back to the place I had left Katya, she was not there. But almost immediately I caught the swirl of her white dress out in the circle of dancers, and I pressed forward to watch her do the rapid, intricate steps of the porrusanda, a vigorous version of the fandango danced with both arms raised and the hands gracefully curved overhead, while the feet execute the quick, stamping steps. She danced the porrusanda as though she had been born to it, her face radiant, her eyes shining, her body delighting in the opportunity for athletic expression. I smiled with proprietary pleasure as I looked on, not feeling the slightest twinge of jealousy over the handsome young Basque lad who danced before her. He wore the white duck trousers and full white shirt of a jai alai player, and the red sash about his waist indicated that his team had won in that afternoon’s contest at the village fronton. Their matching white costumes and their exceptional strength and grace gave them the appearance of a pair of professional dancers among the variegated crowd, and some of the people standing near me muttered praises as they clapped in time with the music.
   The tune ended with a twirling flutter of the txitsu flute, and the jai alai player escorted Katya back to where I was standing and returned her to me with an extravagant and slightly taunting bow.
   “You look charming when you dance,” I told her.
   “Thank you. I love to dance. Is that for me?”
   “What? Oh, yes. Here you are.” I opened the citronade and poured it for her.
   The band began a slower melody to which the older people could dance a passo, and women of a certain age were begged out into the dancing circle by friends and family. After the obligatory refusals and shruggings away, they allowed themselves to be prevailed upon and they danced soberly—pairs of middle-aged women and some quite old; widows and spinsters who cut vegetables in the farm kitchens of their luckier married sisters; several stiff old men with their ten– or eleven-year-old granddaughters—their eyes slyly searching out acquaintances in the crowd to make sure they were being watched, as they should be. Anyone familiar with the rhythms of rural Basque fetes would know that this dance marked the end of the evening for the older women and the younger children, as it was nearly ten o’clock. After all, there would be a fкte again next year, God permitting, and one needn’t spend out all his allotment of joy at one time. The responsible middle-aged men, heads of etche households, would have one last txikiteo around the buvettes with friends, then they, too, would begin to slip away to their carts and carriages to make the slow ride to their outlying farms, to look in on the animals before sleep. This would leave only the young and the very old men to revel until midnight; the Young because they were full of energy and joy, and youth is a brief visitor to one’s life, while old age remains with you until death, like a visiting in-law; and the Old because they had served their many years of toil and merited their few years of relaxation in the knowledge that each hour wounds, and the last kills.
   I offered Katya my arm and we strolled through the thinning crowd towards the bridge and the lower end of the village. She was pleased to hear that I had seen her father engaged in close talk with local elders, presumably gathering folktales for his studies.
   “And the men accepted him, even though he’s an outsider?”
   “Oh yes,” I said. “He’s an avid listener—a rare find in a land noted for its indefatigable storytellers. Then too, he is buying Izarra for the table, and that cannot fail to endear him to the Basque heart. They love their Izarra almost as much as they loathe parting with a sou.”
   “And Paul? Did you see Paul?”
   “Ah-m-m… yes.”
   “Is he enjoying himself?”
   “Ah-m-m… yes. In fact, there he is. Over there.”
   “Where? I don’t see– Oh yes, there he is! What a pretty girl… the one he’s dancing with. Wait a minute, wasn’t she in the motorcar that…?”
   “Yes, she was.”
   “And those two brawny young men watching Paul so intently, aren’t they the ones who drove us off the road?”
   “They are.”
   Her expression grew troubled. “I do hope there isn’t going to be any trouble. Paul can be a trifle… provocative.”
   “Oh, really? I hadn’t noticed. But I thought you were looking forward to a little bagarre basque.”
   “But not with my brother as one of the principals. Wait. Listen.” We stopped before the door of a cafй/bar within which a group of old men were singing in the plaintive high warble of Basque song with its haunting harmonies. “What a sad melody,” she said, after listening for a time.
   “All Basque songs are tugged towards the minor key.”
   “Do you know the song?”
   “Yes. It’s a traditional ballad: ‘Maritxu Nora Zoaz.’ I should warn you that it’s considered a little off-color.”
   “Oh? How do the words go?”
   I had to consider for a moment, for I had no experience in translating Basque. When I spoke Basque, I thought in Basque; and I found it difficult to find French equivalents for—not the words, as they were simple enough—but for the meanings and implications of the words. “Well, literally the song asks: Marie, where are you going? And she answers: To the fountain, Bartholomeo. Where white wine flows. Where we can drink as much as we want.”
   “And that’s it?”
   “That’s it.”
   “It doesn’t sound very off-color to me.”
   “Perhaps not. But any Basque would know that the fountain isn’t a fountain, and the wine isn’t really wine, and the act of drinking is… well, not the act of drinking.”
   “You’re a devious people, you Basque,” she said with a comic frown.
   “We’d rather view ourselves as laudably subtle.” We had reached the edge of the village and were approaching the bridge leading to the meadow in which carts and carriages were awaiting the merrymakers, a regular trickle of whom were leaving the fкte. “Shall we cross the stream and walk in the meadow?” I asked.
   She laughed. “So long as the bridge is a bridge, and the meadow is a meadow, and a walk is a walk.”
   The late-rising gibbous moon lay chubby and cheese-colored on the mountain horizon, softly illuminating the meadow as at early dawn, but with silver rather than gold. Perhaps inspired by the young couples in the square, I had slipped my arm around her waist, doing thoughtlessly what I would not have dared to do with premeditation. I shortened my stride, so that we walked in rhythm, and I was warmly aware of the sensation of our casual contact. We walked slowly around the ring of horses standing sleepily in their traces—thick-bodied workhorses, for these peasants could not afford the luxury of an animal useful only for transportation and show. Katya hummed a swatch of “Maritxu Nora Zoaz,” then stopped in midphrase and fell pensive.
   For the first time that evening, save for an icy moment when the Drowned Virgin brushed past us, I permitted my thoughts to touch on the dark events back in Paris that had driven the Trevilles to Salies, and which were now driving them yet farther. I still could not accept the thought of Monsieur Treville as a madman capable of killing. That gentle old pedant who was even then drinking with Basque peasants and absorbing their rambling folktales? How could it be?
   I felt the warmth of Katya’s waist in my palm, and I recalled that, in return for Paul’s permission to speak with her later that night in a last effort to persuade her to stay with me and let her father and brother flee alone, I had promised never to attempt to see her again.
   “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Why so distant?”
   “Oh,” I shrugged, “it’s nothing. You are enjoying yourself, aren’t you?”
   “Oh, yes. I haven’t had such fun since… well, I don’t believe I’ve ever had such fun. You are very lucky to be Basque, you know. You must be proud of it.”
   I smiled. “No, not proud. I never thought of it as an advantage. In fact, quite the opposite. I used to be ashamed of my accent, and of the fun others made of it. Then too, there’s a darker side to the Basque character. They can be narrow, jealous, superstitious, tight-fisted. And when they feel themselves wronged, they never forgive. Never.”
   “But they have such a love of life!”
   “That they have. And of land. And of coin.”
   “Oh, stop it. You are very lucky to be… something. Most of us are cut from the same bolt of cloth. We’re modern educated French… all alike… all informed by the same books… all limited by the same fears and prejudices. We’re interchangeable… identical, even in our shared belief that we are particular and unique. But you—even if you’re not proud of it—you come from something. You are something. You participate in traditions and characteristics that are a thousand years old.”
   “A thousand? Oh, much more than a thousand!”
   She looked at me quizzically. “You’re quite sure you’re not proud?”
   I laughed. “Trapped, by God! Yes, I suppose there’s something in what you say, but I– Oh-oh. What have we here?”
   “What is it?”
   We were passing the motorcar where it was stationed under a tree. On the padded and buttoned leather seat were four bright brass objects: the headlamps, which had been wrenched from their sockets and broken off, then carefully deposited there in a row.
   Katya was silent for a moment, then she said, “Paul?”
   “I’m afraid so. Perhaps we should go back to the fкte.”
   By the time we reached the bridge, the moon had risen off the mountains and had become smaller, whiter, colder; but it still lit our way to the edge of the square with its smears of colored light from the paper lanterns. As we approached, the band suddenly broke off in the middle of a dance tune and an excited murmur rose from the crowd. I took Katya by the arm and drew her forward to the rim of the onlookers.
   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.
   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

Shibumi

Rodney Whitaker

Part One.
Washington
Etchebar
Washington
Shanghai: 193?
Washington
Japan
Washington
Japan
Washington
Japan
Part Two.
Washington
Japan
Washington
Gouffre Porte-de-Larrau
Château d’Etchebar
Part Three.
Château d’Etchebar
Larun
Etchebar
Part Four.
St. Jean de Luz/Biarritz
Heathrow
Middle Bumley
Heathrow
Part Five.
Château d’Etchebar
Gouffre Porte-de-Larrau
Part Six.
Etchebar
The Church at Alos
New York
Gouffre Field/Col. Pierre St. Martin
Château d’Etchebar