I first saw Katya at a distance. I was sitting right here, beneath this ancient tree on the riverside park, my notebook in my lap as it is now. I was daydreaming under the guise of meditating, when I looked up and noticed her walking across the deep lawn towards me. My first glance, a squint from beneath my straw boater, was casual, and I returned to my thoughts, only to be attracted again almost immediately. I later told myself that I had sensed something of significance in her approach, but that is nonsense. It was probably the determination in her strong stride that captured my attention. The ladies who took the air and waters of Salies strolled around the paths of the park with studied aimlessness, gossiping as they engaged in attractive light exercise, always in twos, for ladies in those days did not stroll in a park alone. Katya’s purposeful stride had none of the rhythms of strolling.
   I was a bit embarrassed and uncertain at her approach, once I determined that, for lack of alternative in the empty park, I must be her objective. Should I stand to greet her? Would that not seem forward, as she was a stranger to me? On the other hand, how could I receive her sitting with my back against a tree, a notebook in my lap, my skimmer down over my eyes? One has to be young and of a certain temperament to find confusion and embarrassment in such trivial social incidents, and I was exactly the right age and temperament. I sat up and looked around rather theatrically, seeking to communicate to her that I was searching for the object of her quest and was not so bold as to assume it was I. Then I stood, took off my straw hat, and awaited her arrival with a smile that fluttered weakly for want of sure purpose.
   “Mademoiselle?” I ventured when she was standing before me.
   “You are Dr. Montjean?”
   “That is one of my burdens, yes.” It was a habit of mine to rehearse social situations and to develop what I thought were cultured and interesting responses to simple questions. The effect was rather stilted and artificial, and I almost always regretted the words as they escaped from my mouth.
   “My brother has had an accident, Doctor.” The matter-of-fact way she said this suggested there was no great urgency.
   “Oh?” I looked across the park, half expecting to see someone approaching—a friend, the brother himself—for who would send a young lady to fetch a doctor if there were others available. “Ah… where is your brother now, Mademoiselle…?” I lifted my eyebrows in gentle request for her name.
   “He’s at home.”
   “At home?”
   “Yes. We live at Etcheverria. Do you know the house?”
   I confessed that I did not.
   “It’s two-point-six kilometers from Salies, up the Mauleon road.”
   I had to smile at the precision. “Two-point-six kilometers exactly?”
   She nodded. “Shall we go?”
   “Ah… by all means. I shall have to collect my bag.” She turned and began to walk across the grass towards the village square before I could offer my arm, so I found myself awkwardly hastening to catch up with her. “Ah… how did you come into the village? Have you a trap?”
   “I rode in on my bicycle. I left it in the square.”
   Young women of that era sometimes teetered about on bicycles for amusement and display, but the use of them for transportation was not common, inhibitions of propriety no less prohibitive than inhibitions of dress. I found her indifference to those inhibitions intriguing. “Can you tell me something about your brother’s accident, Mademoiselle…?”
   “Treville. Oh, I don’t believe it’s anything really serious, Doctor. He fell from his machine.”
   “His bicycle?”
   “Yes. We were having a race, and he fell.”
   “A race? I see.” I glanced over at her profile and was taken by the golden, suntanned cheek and the healthy complexion, uncommon in women of the middle class where pallor was not only accounted an element of beauty, but a cherished proof that one was leisured. She was hatless, a lapse of sartorial propriety when women wore fluttering, broad-brimmed hats even when motoring or riding. Her full dark hair was drawn back in a soft bun, but wisps had escaped to float about her temples—disarranged, no doubt, by her bicycle ride of exactly two and six-tenths kilometers. It would not be correct to describe her as a beauty, for there was too much vigor in her features, too much energy in her expression, to satisfy the popular ideal of plump passive beauty. One might more accurately call her a handsome woman… I thought her a very handsome woman indeed. I was looking at the graceful line of her neck, the nape of which was brushed by soft commas of hair, when she turned to me, her eyes asking why I was staring at her in that way.
   “Ah… and what is the nature of your brother’s injuries?” I asked quickly.
   “Well, he’s a bit scraped up, of course. And it could be that he has a broken clavicle. But there’s no concussion.”
   I frowned. “I am impressed, Mlle Treville. You seem to have some knowledge of medicine.”
   She shrugged and puffed air between slack lips in the way that peasants or street gamines dismiss some insignificant matter. “Not really.”
   “But most people, and nearly all women, would have called the clavicle a collarbone.”
   “One summer I developed an interest in anatomy, and I read several books. That’s all. There’s no mystery.”
   How can I explain the implications of a young lady in the summer of 1914 admitting to an interest in anatomy? It would be as though one of today’s pert Modern Young Things were to confess to a fascination with pornography. The conventions of polite conversation did not admit the existence of the human body, much less its parts separately considered.
   We had passed out of the park and were walking along the tree-lined central avenue of Salies towards the clinic. Two women on the other side of the street stopped to exchange whispers about the hatless girl walking brazenly with the young doctor. And indeed there was something in the vigor of Katya’s long, athletic stride that might be considered unladylike. It would not be exactly fair to say that ladies of that time minced, but certainly they did not stride along, as it was clearly infra dig to appear to have to get anywhere with urgency.
   “How can you know your brother does not suffer from a concussion?” I asked.
   “His eyes respond to light by a contraction of the pupil,” she answered with a tone suggesting an unnecessary statement of the obvious. “How else would one test for concussion?”
   “How else indeed,” I said, a bit nettled. “I take it there was also a summer’s reading devoted to diagnostics?”
   She stopped walking and turned to me, puzzled by the archness of my tone. Her eyes searched mine in a most disconcerting way, with an expression of sincere interrogation mixed with amusement, an expression I was later to find particular to her, and very dear to me. “I’ve been guilty of invading your domain of authority, haven’t I?” she said. “I am sorry.”
   “Oh, no. It isn’t that at all,” I protested.
   “Isn’t it?”
   “Certainly not… well, yes frankly.” I grinned. “After all, I am supposed to be the wise old doctor, and you the distressed and admiring patient.”
   She smiled. “I promise to be as distressed and admiring as possible the next time we meet.”
   “Ah, that’s more like it.”
   “And you must play the wise old doctor… well, the wise young doctor.”
   “Young… but dignified.”
   “Oh, yes, dignified to be sure. Tell me, would it damage your dignity to learn that we have walked past the clinic?”
   “What? Ah! So we have. Pretending to forget my destination is a little ruse I use to test whether my companion is paying attention.”
   “Very clever.”
   “Thank you. Would you care to step in while I gather my things?”
   “Thank you, no. I’ll wait for you here.”
   I borrowed Doctor Gros’s sulky and we rode south out of town into the countryside where apple trees bordering the dirt road scented the noonday air with their ripening fruit. Despite my practice of rehearsing ideal conversations to myself and loading my statements until they dripped with wit and insight, I could think of nothing amusing to say. She, for her part, seemed uninterested in social chatter as she sat with her face lifted to the sun in evident pleasure. Twice she turned to me and smiled in a generous, impersonal way. She delighted in the warmth of the sun and the touch of the breeze created by the motion of the trap, and she smiled back at the moment that was giving her pleasure. I was included in that smile as though I were a likable, anonymous thing.
   Failing to think of anything interesting or witty to say, I fell back upon the banal. “I take it you are not of the pays, Mademoiselle?” Her speech lacked the chanting twang and the sounded final e of the south.
   “No.” She was silent for a moment, then she seemed to realize that a one-syllable answer was a bit brusque. “No, we came for the waters.”
   “It must be inconvenient.”
   She had already returned to her pleasurable reverie, so it was several moments before she said, “I’m sorry. You were saying?…”
   “Nothing important.”
   “Oh? I see.”
   Half a minute passed in silence. “I simply suggested that it must be inconvenient.”
   “What must be?”
   I sighed. “Living so far from the village… being here for the waters and living so far from the village.” I sincerely wished I had not entered on this topic of conversation that neither interested her nor showed me to advantage.
   “We prefer it, really.”
   “I suppose you don’t have to come into town every day for your regimen of the waters, then.” I said this knowing perfectly well that she did not come in every day. Salies is a very small place, and I was a romantic young man with much leisure. If she came often to Salies, I would have seen her; and if I had seen her, I would certainly have remembered her.
   “No, not every day. In fact…” She smiled a greeting to an old peasant we were passing on the road, and he lifted his chin in the crisp Basque salute that is as much dismissal as it is greeting. Then she turned again to me. “In fact, we don’t come in at all.”
   “But…”
   “When I told you we were here to take the waters, I was lying.”
   “Lying?” I smiled. “Do you make a practice of lying?”
   She nodded thoughtfully. “It’s often the easiest thing to do, and sometimes the kindest. It is true that we are here for reasons of health, and to avoid unnecessary questions I say we are taking the waters.”
   “I see. But what—” I stopped short and laughed. “I was going to indulge in one of those unnecessary questions.”
   She laughed with me. “I’m sure you were. Ah! We have arrived. That lane to the right.”
   The grassy, rutted condition of the tree-lined lane attested to its long period of disuse before the Trevilles occupied the house. As we approached the ancient stone heap called Etcheverria we passed along the crumbling wall of a derelict garden grown rank with weeds among which a few volunteer flowers struggled in stunted bloom, reminders of the passing hand of man. Twice the horse jerked aside nervously.
   “It’s haunted, you know,” she said with a smile.
   “And you don’t mind living in a haunted house?”
   “No, not the house. The garden. Local tradition says the garden is haunted.” She cocked her head thoughtfully and added, “Well, perhaps the house is haunted as well. Most houses are… in one way or another.”
   “That’s an interesting observation. But Dr. Freud would contend that it is most people, not most houses, that are haunted… in one way or another.”
   She nodded. “Yes, I know.”
   I was genuinely surprised. And fascinated. “You have read Dr. Freud?”
   “Yes. After I had learned what I wanted to know about anatomy.” She laughed. “One leads to the other, I suppose. First you learn how the various bits function, then you wonder why they bother to.”
   We turned in at the sagging gate. It was not necessary to tie up the horse, as she was an experienced doctor’s mare used to standing calmly in the traces. By the time I walked around to offer her a hand down, Katya had already begun to descend on her own. My clumsy attempt to give un-needed assistance and her last-minute effort to accept the titular support of my guiding hand created a moment of awkward grappling that made us both laugh.
   “This is the stuff of low comedy,” she said.
   “Or of high romance,” I added.
   She smiled up at me. “No. Only low comedy, I think.”
   “Well, perhaps you’re right. That’s the first time I ever danced with a woman who wasn’t—” I am sure I must have blushed to my ears as I realized that my hand still rested on her waist. I pulled it back quickly.
   She lead the way towards the house. “A woman who wasn’t… what?” she asked over her shoulder.
   How could I say: who wasn’t wearing stays? My palm still felt the indescribably exciting texture of soft flesh under firm fabric. “Who wasn’t…” I cleared my throat. “…a member of my family.”
   She glanced at me sideways. “I don’t believe that.”
   “Good. I often lie, you see. It’s the easiest thing to do, and sometimes the kindest.”
   She chuckled. “All right.”
   The faзade of the house was in poor repair; rising damp had rotted the plaster in places, revealing rough-cut stone beneath. As we stepped into the central hall I was aware of a dank chill that must have made the place most uncomfortable in winter.
   “Katya?” a man’s voice called from a room off the principal hall.
   “Yes, Paul,” she answered. “I have the doctor with me. Help is on its way, if you can manage to cling to life for a moment longer.”
   The man laughed in full voice as she motioned me to follow her into the salon.
   “Paul, this is Dr. Montjean. Dr. Montjean, my poor battered brother.”
   As he rose from a chaise, his right arm bound against his chest by strips of linen, my astonishment was undisguised.
   They were twins. Identical in every feature: the full mouths, the high foreheads, the prominent cheekbones, the firm chins, the thick chestnut hair. The features were identical, but the effect was startlingly different, as the same elements were interpreted in the context of their sexes. What in her was a handsome beauty appeared frail and almost effeminate in him. What in her movements was grace, in his seemed affectation. An unkind critic might have described her as having, in a way of speaking, a bit too much face; while he had too little. This difference-within-similarity was nowhere more evident than in their eyes. The same almond shape and slightly crooked set, the same clear pale grey made startling by dark lush lashes, but they created totally opposite impressions. She had a gentleness of glance that seemed to invite one to look into the springs of her being. His glance was metallic and impenetrable. Light glinted on the surface of his eyes, while it glowed from deep within hers. Her eyes were bridges; his barriers.
   They laughed together at my frank surprise. “It’s a tired old prank, Doctor, not warning people in advance that we are twins,” the brother said as he pressed my hand in that awkward upside-down way of the left-handed handshake. “But we never weary of the effect it has on people the first time they see us together. Forgive us for amusing ourselves at your expense, but there is so little to divert one in this out-of-the-way bled.”

   I sought to recover my aplomb by assuming a professional tone. “Your sister tells me you fell from your bicycle.”
   He glanced at her and grinned. “Well, I suppose you could put it that way if you wanted to. Actually—”
   “—I’ll see to a little refreshment,” she interposed quickly. “A cup of tisane, Doctor?”
   “Please.”
   As she left the room, the brother raised his voice, pursuing her with his words. “That’s one way of putting it, Doctor. Actually, my good sister knocked me from my machine!”
   “Rubbish!” she called back from down the hall.
   He laughed softly and shook his head as I began undoing the rather expertly wrapped bandage. He winced at first contact but spoke on as I made my examination. “It’s true, you know. She’s vicious in competition. We were having a little race to the bottom of the lane and back and– Argh! Jesus, Doctor! If you are going to ask if that hurt, the answer is yes!”
   “Sorry.”
   “I wonder if that’s enough? Well, I got ahead of her in the race by the mild subterfuge of starting before she was ready. I had reached the end of the lane and was on my way back, and what did she do? She– Ah! Damn it, man! Was your last post with the Inquisition? It’s broken, I assume?”
   “Cracked surely.”
   “Rotten luck. Well, as I passed her on the way back she kicked out at me and drove me into the garden wall. Just like that. The Jockey Club would certainly have disqualified her.”
   “The Jockey Club? You are Parisian then?”
   He lifted an eyebrow in surprise. “Why, yes. I’m amazed you’ve heard of it. From your accent, I assumed you were from hereabouts.”
   “I was unaware that I had an accent.” Actually, I had been at great pains while studying in Paris to lose my singsong Basque accent, as its rustic implications had been a source of ridicule among my fellow students.
   “Oh, it’s not much of an accent, I suppose. More a matter of rhythm than pronunciation. I am something of a student of accents, as nothing is so illustrative of breeding and class as customs of speech.”
   Paul Treville himself had a tone of speech, a certain nasal laxity, that I recognized as upper-class Parisian, a sound I used to resent because it bespoke wealth and comfort while I had had to work and struggle for my education. It was a pattern of speech that I had always thought of not as an accent, but as an affectation.
   “If I were called upon to describe your accent, Doctor, I would say it was the sound of a man who had worked on losing his southern chant and had very nearly succeeded.”
   It was, of course, the accuracy of his evaluation that irritated me. We all desire to be understood, but no one enjoys being obvious. I am afraid my annoyance was not well concealed, for he smiled in a way that told me he took pleasure in baiting me.
   “You’re rather young to be a doctor, aren’t you?”
   “I’m only just out of training.”
   “I see. I do hope I’m not your first patient.”
   “You’d be better advised to hope you’re not my last. Don’t move about. I have to bind your arm to your chest to immobilize it. It may hurt a bit.”
   “I’m sure it will. So you’ve heard of the Jockey Club, have you? I dare to assume you were not a member.”
   “You assume correctly. My memories of Paris are those of the impoverished student—of that bohemian life that is more pleasant to talk about than to live. The cost of membership in your club—even assuming I had found a sponsor, which is most unlikely—would have paid for all of my education.”
   “Yes, I daresay. But it may have been a better investment in the long run. You’d have met a better sort of people there.”
   “The important people?”
   He smiled at the archness of my tone, but I evaporated the smile with a firmer than necessary tug on the bandage.
   “Ah! You do know that hurts, I suppose?”
   “Hm-hm.”
   “You appear to suffer under the delusion that the only important people are those who sweat in the vineyards, Doctor. The tinkers, the masons, the plowboys, the… leeches. You overlook the great social value of the aristocracy.”
   “And what do you believe that to be?” I asked atonically as I busied myself with wrapping the gauze bandage around his smooth, hairless chest.
   “Ever since the cultural suicide of the Revolution, it has been the role of my class to serve the bourgeoisie as object lessons against the evils of idle dissipation. I have approached my duties with admirable diligence, if I say so myself, devoting myself to gambling, target-shooting, listless promiscuity, vacuous badinage—all the traditional occupations of the young man of the world.”
   “How boring that must be for you.”
   “It is, rather.”
   “And for your interlocutors.”
   “Ah, the lad has fangs!”
   “Do try to stand still.”
   “Now, my father has gone about being useless in a more oblique way. He is something of a gentleman scholar. But I’m afraid his uselessness goes unnoticed and unappreciated, as uselessness is the norm in academics.”
   “And your sister?”
   “Katya? Ah, there you touch a sore point—do you enjoy puns?”
   “Not overly.”
   “Pity. Yes, Katya is something of a disgrace to her class. Given half a chance, I’m afraid she would involve herself in all sorts of uplifting activities. Fortunately, there are no opportunities for her to indulge herself in this forgotten hole, so our family tradition of uselessness goes unblemished. Well, Doctor? What’s the diagnosis? Am I to toil away the remainder of my life a hopeless cripple?”
   “Not on a physical level. So long as your arm and shoulder are kept immobilized, nature will mend you. But it may be a month or so before you have full use of it.”
   “A month!”
   “Bones mend at their own pace, Monsieur Treville.”
   He looked at me quizzically. “Treville? Did Katya tell you our name was Treville?”
   “Why yes. Isn’t it?”
   He thrust out his lower lip and waved his free hand carelessly. “Oh, of course. Treville. Hm-m-m. I rather like the sound of it, don’t you?”
   I felt I was being made a figure of fun, and there are few things less supportable for a young man whose fragile dignity is not buttressed by accomplishments. My resentment was manifest in the brusque, silent way I finished binding him up and in the cold tone of, “There you are, Monsieur Treville. Now. Are there any other injuries? I’m a bit pressed for time.”
   “Oh, are you really?” Paul Treville smiled and raised an eyebrow. “You know, Doctor, it has always amused me how people in your profession dare to assume a superior attitude on the basis of nothing more than having avoided going into trade by mucking about for a few years with chemicals and pus and fetal pigs in brine. You seem to forget that you make your money by selling your services to anybody who has the money.”
   “The same could be said of many professionals.”
   “Yes, indeed. Whores, for instance.”
   I stared at him silently for a long moment. Then I repeated coldly, “Are there any other injuries? Dizziness? Nausea? Headache?”
   “Only the odd scrape and bruise. But I am sure they will heal in time. The passage of time, it would appear, is your idea of a universal panacea. Have you ever considered sharing your fee with Father Time?”
   I was on the verge of replying in kind when Katya returned bearing a silver tray with teapot and cups. “Shall we take it on the terrace?”
   Still stung by her brother’s attitude, I considered saying that I had too busy a schedule to dawdle over tea, but two things prevented me. The first was the thought that my languid condition when Katya first found me in the park might make this sound ridiculous. The second was the fact that I was in love with Katya.
   I did not realize this at the time, of course, but hindsight clarifies events by diminishing blurring details, and it is obvious to me now that I was already in the first stages of interest, affection, and excitement that would soon blossom into love. Nothing significant had yet passed between us—the look of her suntanned profile as I walked beside her in the park, the wisps of hair at her temples, the way her eyes had searched mine with a mixture of sincerity and amusement, the accidental touch of her hand and the feel of her waist when I had awkwardly attempted to help her down from the sulky—nothing of substance. But the particles from which love is built up are too fine to be subdivided and analyzed, just as the total of a love is too extensive to be perceived at one time and from one emotional coign of vantage. Beyond reason, beyond logic, and without knowing it, I was in love with her.
   I expressed my love with admirable restraint: I told her I would be delighted to take tea on the terrace.
   The brother rose and said that he would have to deny himself the pleasure and enlightenment of my company, as he really should go to his room and rest in hopes of inspiring Time to intercede on his behalf and cure him. He bowed to me with a slightly taunting deference as he said, “Above all, Doctor, avoid challenging my sister on any subject. If she fears she might lose a contest, she’s not above bashing you with the teapot. As for you, Katya, let me warn you that the good doctor seems to be in a rather contentious mood this afternoon. No doubt a little sensitive about his limitations as a healer of broken bodies. Well, I’m off. Do have a pleasant chat.”
   The terrace on which we sat, overlooking the dank, neglected garden, was dappled with sunlight through branches of the trees. And when the slight breezes sketched patterns of shadow over Katya’s high-necked dress of white lawn trimmed with lace at the cuffs and throat, the light striking her bodice reflected up under her firm round chin and seemed to set her face aglow. I watched, absorbed, as she served the pale tisane with gestures as graceful as they were sure and nonchalant. That ease of habit, I assumed, was a matter of breeding, just as was her brother’s indolent superiority. I was again struck by the similarities, and blessed differences, between them.
   “You live here alone… you and your brother?” I asked.
   “There is a village woman who comes.”
   “But not, presumably, a gardener.” I gestured towards the congested overgrowth before us.
   She laughed. “That’s not fair. I have toiled long hours in an effort to create an artless, even wild effect. And you don’t seem to be impressed by it.”
   “Oh, but I am impressed. You have achieved an effect that I might term… uniquely unstudied.”
   “Thank you,” she said, bowing her head in modest acceptance of the praise.
   “And your parents?” I asked. “Where are they?”
   “My mother died in childbirth… our birth.”
   “I’m sorry.”
   “You’re not really, of course. How could you be? But I appreciate your conventional expression of sympathy.”
   “And your father?”
   She looked out over the garden and sipped her tisane. Then she replaced the cup in its saucer and said airily, “Oh, Father’s hale enough.”
   “He lives here with you?”
   “We live with him, actually.”
   I was somewhat surprised. If there was a father living here, how did it come to pass that Katya was dispatched on a bicycle to fetch a doctor, all the way to Salies?
   She smiled. “Well, to tell the truth, Father does not know about Paul’s little accident yet. The quotidian problems of life are quite beyond Father’s capacity to cope. No, let me say that more correctly. It’s not his capacity to cope that is in question, it’s his interest in coping. He devotes most of each day to his ‘studies.’ “ She accented the word comically in what I took to be an imitation of her father’s voice.
   “Studies of what kind?”
   “Goodness only knows. He pores over thick tomes and works at reducing them to scratchings in thin little notebooks, and every now and then he says ‘Hm-m-m’ or ‘Ah!’ or ‘I wonder?’ “ She laughed lightly. “I’m really not doing him justice. He’s a dear old thing with a passion for medieval village life and customs that absorbs his time and mind, leaving him with only the most vague interest in the here and now. I sometimes think Father believes us to be living in an era that is posthistoric and rather insignificant.”
   “Is that where it comes from? Your interest in books and learning? Not many women concern themselves with such things as anatomy and Dr. Freud.”
   “I’ve never cared much what other women do. Another cup?”
   “Please.”
   As she leaned forward to pour, she said quietly, as though it had been on her mind all along, “You don’t like my brother, do you?”
   “What makes you think that?”
   “Oh, there was a certain tension in the air when I returned with tea.”
   “Yes. I suppose there was.”
   “And? What do you think of him?”
   “Shall I be frank?”
   “That means you intend to say something unpleasant, doesn’t it?”
   “I could not be both pleasant and honest.”
   “My word!” she said with mock astonishment. “Now, that is frank.”
   “I don’t mean to be offensive—”
   “But?”
   “But… well, don’t you find him a little supercilious and arrogant?”
   “He’s just playful.”
   “Perhaps. May I ask you, is your name really Treville?”
   She looked up in surprise. “What an odd question!”
   I began to explain that it wasn’t odd at all, considering her brother’s reaction to being called Monsieur Treville, but she interrupted me with, “Oh, I see. He lead you to believe Treville wasn’t our name.”

   “He did in fact.”
   She smiled and shook her head. “Isn’t that just like him.”
   “I don’t know. But I assume it is.”
   “Just a bit of his playfulness. He enjoys having people on… keeping them off balance. You must forgive him.”
   “Must I?”
   “I was rather hoping you two might hit it off. He knows no one here.”
   “I’m afraid the possibility of our hitting it off is rather distant.”
   “Too bad. The poor fellow has a quick, intelligent mind and nothing to exercise it on in this forgotten corner of the world. He’s bored to distraction.”
   “Why doesn’t he go elsewhere?”
   “He is not free to.”
   The tone in which she said this prohibited me from pursuing the reasons he was not free, so I asked instead, “Why doesn’t he occupy himself with reading and study, as you do?”
   “Other people’s ideas bore him. Shall we walk in the garden?”
   So blatant was this change of subject that I had to smile. “Won’t we need a native boy to cut a trail for us?”
   She laughed as she walked ahead of me. “No, there’s a well-worn path through the jungle. I spend much of the day at the bottom of the garden. There’s a summerhouse—well, what’s left of a summerhouse—where I enjoy hiding away with a book. Now, it is true that if you stray off the path we may have to muster a search party to find you, but you’re safe enough if you stay close to me.”
   “I can imagine nothing less safe than staying close to you, Mlle Treville, and nothing more desirable.”
   She frowned. “That is unworthy of you, Dr. Montjean. Men don’t seem to realize that automatic, boyish gallantry can be a terrible bore. A woman must either pretend that she did not hear it, or she must respond to it. And often, she’d rather do neither.”
   I felt my ears redden. “I am sorry. You are quite right, of course. May I make a confession to you?”
   “I don’t know. Will the confession be a burden? Will I be obligated to keep your secrets? Or to pretend at compassion?”
   “No, it’s an altogether trivial confession.”
   “Oh, then by all means confess to me. I’m quite comfortable with the altogether trivial.”
   “It’s actually more an explanation than a confession. That ‘automatic, boyish gallantry’ you quite rightly objected to is a result of a terrible habit I’ve fallen into. When I’m alone and daydreaming, I practice at confecting clever lines of dialogue. But when I inflict them on people in real life, somehow the cleverness dissolves in my mouth, and only a stilted artificiality is left. I didn’t mean to be forward. I confess, however, to being maladroit. Can you forgive me?”
   She turned to me and searched my eyes with hers. “What is your given name, Dr. Montjean?”
   “Jean-Marc.”
   “Jean-Marc Montjean. Sounds like a character in a nineteenth-century novel. No wonder you’re stricken with romanticism.”
   I shrugged. “Didn’t I hear your brother call you Katya?”
   “Yes.”
   “Katya? Russian diminutive for Catherine? But you’re not Russian, are you?”
   “No. And my name isn’t Catherine. With brutal disregard for the delicate feelings of a young woman, and with no ear for poetry at all, my father baptized me Hortense. As soon as I realized that one could do such things, I changed my name to Katya.”
   “Changed your name? By legal process?”
   “No. By simple force of will. I merely refused to respond to the name Hortense, and I did nothing I was bade unless I was called Katya.”
   “And you accuse me of being a romantic?”
   “It wasn’t an accusation. It was simply a description.”
   “What a strong-minded child you must have been to force everyone to call you by a new name.”
   “ ‘Little brat’ might be closer to the mark.” She turned and continued down the narrow path.
   As the overgrowth pressed in on us, the acrid smell of damp weeds rose from the cold earth and I felt a sudden ripple of chill over my skin. “Well, well. The ghost must be nearby,” I said, seeking to pass off my discomfort with a joke.
   She stopped and turned to me, her expression quite serious. “Ghost? I’ve never thought of it as a ghost.”
   “Well… what haunts this place then, if not a ghost?”
   “A spirit. I’m sure she’d rather be called a spirit than a ghost.”
   “It’s a woman then, the gho—spirit?”
   “Yes. A girl, actually. Ghost indeed! What a grim idea!”
   “Perhaps, but there’s something inevitably grim about ghosts. Being grim is their mйtier.”
   “That may be true of ghosts, but it is not true of spirits, which are an altogether higher order of beings. And that’s all I want to hear about the matter. Well, we have arrived. What do you think of my private library?”
   I surveyed the ruin of what had once been a charming little summerhouse. “Ah… Oh, it’s… magnificent. Magnificent! Perhaps a touch of paint would not be inappropriate. And I don’t think the replacement of some of the broken lattice slats would harm the effect overmuch. But I do like that quaint touch of rot around the foundation. And that nonchalant sag of the beams! It’s an architectural wonder, your library, standing as it does in defiance of the laws of gravity.”
   “It’s a light-hearted little building, and therefore doesn’t have to obey the laws of gravity. Why do you pull such a face?”
   “What a wretched pun!”
   “You don’t care for puns?”
   “Not overly, as I told you before.”
   “You never told me you were a sworn enemy of the noble pun.”
   “Yes I did—ah, no. It was your brother I told. Is this addiction to puns a family trait—a genetic flaw?”
   “We are willing to allow words to function irreverently, if that’s what you mean.”
   “It’s not what I meant, but it will do.” I looked about. “You can’t see the house from here.”
   “What’s more to the point, you can’t be seen from the house,” she said, smiling at me.
   After a second of wondering if I could interpret this as an invitation to some kind of intimacy, I took her hand and held it in both of mine. She did not resist, but her hand was limp and there was no return of my affectionate pressure. She simply searched my eyes with a little frown of—not annoyance, really—of doubtful inquiry.
   “Mlle Treville…” I said, with nothing further to add.
   “Yes?”
   “You are… very beautiful.”
   She laughed at me. “That’s not really true, you know. I believe I am a handsome woman. Healthy. Pleasant to look at. But I am not beautiful, and it’s foolish of you to say so.”
   I suffered in silent confusion. I wanted to explain that my gesture of affection implied no disrespect. It was simply that she seemed so free and fresh, so… modern, I guess… that I felt she would understand my frank– Ah! I couldn’t find the words to explain myself.
   “Does it please you to hold my hand?” she asked with a tone of mild interest.
   “Ah… yes. Of course.”
   “Very well, then.” She stood quite patiently, her hand unresisting but mute in mine, until growing feelings of awkwardness caused me to release it with a last pressure of farewell.
   I feared that my boldness had ruined our former effortless amicability, so I searched for anything to say. “Ah… your father, I take it, is unwell?”
   I was surprised at the effect of this random observation. Her expression clouded and she stepped back from me. “Why on earth do you say such a thing?”
   I stammered, “Well… you said your family was here for reasons of health. You are obviously… healthy.” I sought to make a little joke. “And, apart from his compulsion for leaping from moving bicycles, your brother seems fairly normal. So I naturally assumed that it was your father who was ill.” I shrugged.
   “Oh. I see.” Her expression cleared and she smiled. Then, to my surprise, she slipped her hand into the crook of my arm and led me back up the path towards the house. “I’m afraid my bicycle is going to be a bit of a problem,” she said, with what I would soon come to recognize as a characteristic habit of shifting from topic to topic with a glissando of non sequiturs that made internal sense to her but to no one else.
   “Problem of what sort?”
   “Of a minor sort, I suppose. I don’t really feel like returning to Salies just now. I wonder if you would mind collecting my machine from the square and keeping it for me until tomorrow?”
   “I should be delighted. But how will you get into town tomorrow?”
   She shrugged. “I’ll walk of course. It’s only a short ways.”
   “Ah yes. Exactly two and six-tenths kilometers, as I recall.”
   A look of delighted wonder animated her eyes. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if it really were? I’ve never actually measured it, you know. I have noticed that people are impressed by exact measurements, so I provide them out of my imagination. But wouldn’t it be amazing if one of them were accidentally correct?”
   I dared a slight pressure on her hand by flexing my arm. “You are a strange and exceptional person. Do you know that? May one say that much without being guilty of boring you with automatic, boyish gallantry?”
   “One may.”
   We passed around the terrace to the sulky, where the patient old mare stood stoically, occasionally fluttering a shoulder muscle to discomfit the flies.
   “Until tomorrow then?” she said.
   I smiled at her and nodded. “Until tomorrow.” And she returned to the house.
   As I approached the trap I noticed a pebble of particularly interesting veining beside the wheel, and I automatically picked it up, following a senseless habit from boyhood, a habit that used to annoy the aunt I lived with after the death of my parents. She would throw away scores of pebbles whenever she came across them in her cleaning. The loss never disturbed me, as I was not interested in collecting stones, only in picking them up. And the reason I picked them up was one that made excellent sense to me, though I knew better than to expect anyone else to understand: If I didn’t pick them up… who would?
   The sulky had not gone thirty meters down the rutted lane when I heard Katya’s voice calling after me. I reined in and turned to see her running towards me, one hand holding her skirt aside, and my doctor’s bag in the other. I had climbed down to meet her by the time she arrived, flushed and a bit out of breath. “What must you think of the doctor who forgets the tools of his trade?” I asked.
   She laughed. “Our Dr. Freud would say you did it on purpose.”
   “And he would be right, Mlle Treville. And I’m afraid I have left more behind here than my kit.”
   She shook her head sadly and smiled as one might smile at a persistent, mischievous child not totally lacking in redeeming charm. Then, on an impulse, she rose to her tiptoes and kissed me on the cheek lightly.
   I searched for words, but before I could speak she touched the place on my cheek with her fingertips, as though to seal it, and said, “Hush.” Her lucid grey eyes searched mine for a moment. “May I tell you something? You are the first man outside my family that I have ever kissed. Isn’t that remarkable?”
   “Yes… remarkable. I…” But I could find no words. “Here,” I said, pressing something into her hand.
   “What’s this?”
   “A gift. A pebble.”
   “A pebble?” She looked at the little stone in her palm; then she smiled up at me. “I believe this is the first time anyone has ever given me a pebble. In fact, I’m almost sure it is.” She searched my eyes with that amused curiosity of hers. “Thank you, Jean-Marc Montjean.” And she turned and walked back up the lane.


* * *

   The return to Salies was filled with a young man’s daydreams of the most common and delicious sort. I had never met anyone remotely like Katya (to myself, I already used her first name). I was fascinated by the disturbing blend of quixotism and blunt frankness in her conversation, by her intelligence and freshness of thought, by an absence of conventionality that was not, as it is in so many modern young women, a desperate effort to be original at any cost.
   An hour later, still in a gentle swim of delight, I was pushing Katya’s bicycle across the village square towards my boardinghouse.
   “Here! What’s this?” Doctor Gros called from the shadows of his favorite cafй beneath the arcade that enclosed the square. “Come over here this instant, young man!”
   I propped the bicycle against an arcade column and joined him, my sense of well-being so strengthened by thoughts of Katya that I felt benevolent even to Doctor Gros and his vulgar buffoonery.
   “Sit down, Montjean, and prepare to face the music! Let’s examine these macabre events in sequence; see if we can find a pattern here. Primo, an attractive young woman arrives on a bicycle. Beta, she leaves town in the company of a young doctor of singularly modest accomplishments whose practice of holding forth in a high moral tone makes him automatically suspect. Third, the doctor is seen skulking back into the village with the bicycle, but without the young lady. Clearly, there is dirty work afoot here. Come take a little apйro with me, Montjean, while we squeeze the ugly truth out of this mystery.”
   He was in a jovial mood, and I was pleased to sit with him for a time, sipping a glass while the light drained from the eastern sky and the western horizon grew purple.
   “How did you know about the young lady?” I asked.

   He tapped the side of his veiny, bulbous nose and winked with burlesque iniquity. “I was an unwitting contributor to her tragic fate, my boy. The yellow journalists who swarm all over nasty cases like this will record that it was I, Hippolyte Gros, physician of note and fellow of many unappreciated qualities, who suggested that she consult you, not twenty-four hours before she met her ghastly end. My dear boy, if I had had the slightest hint that you lusted so for a bicycle, I should have contributed anything short of money. You have gone too far this time, Montjean! The judges in their square bonnets will agree with me that you’ve gone too far this time.”
   I chuckled as the waiter brought me a pastis. “So it was you who suggested she consult me?”
   “Just so. She came to the clinic, describing the accident to her brother as a trivial matter that anyone at all could handle. Naturally, the phrase ‘anyone at all’ brought you to mind. I was myself occupied with a patient whose confidence I have been cultivating for some time, and anyway the girl was too young for my taste. Give me married women of a certain age every time. They are so discreet… and grateful. So? Tell me all! Did she plead to retain her bicycle? Were you deaf to her pitiful cries? Blind with passion to be astride her machine?”
   “No.” I laughed.
   “Blind with lust, then?”
   “No.”
   “You must have been blind with something. Being blind is a characteristic of your generation. Ah! Blind drunk, I’ll wager. I’ve always mistrusted your addiction to strong waters, Montjean. Particularly as it is accompanied by an equally strong reticence to offer rounds. Very well, I see that you intend to be churlishly secretive about your conquest; so let us settle between ourselves the minor problems of the planet. The newspapers are full of talk of war. Germany is glowering, France is snarling, Britain is vacillating, and Bosnia—where in hell is Bosnia anyway? One of those half-mythical nations down at the lower right of the map, I shouldn’t wonder. I’ve never trusted that lot. If they had honorable intentions they wouldn’t hide and cower down there. The whole business is as angry and gnarled as the probate of a peasant will. Clarify it for me, Montjean. Focus your fine, Parisian-trained mind on the matter and tell me for once and all: Are we to have war or not? Have I time to order supper before the bombardment begins?”
   “I’m sure I don’t know.”
   “There you go again, being so cocksure of things. Overconfidence is an ugly characteristic of your generation—that and being blind. And refusing to offer rounds. Well, if you don’t know, I do! There will be no war! You have my word on it.” He drew a sigh and made a comic face. “But then, I must tell you that I am the fellow who assured everyone that the Prussians were only bluffing back in ‘70.”
   “Dr. Gros, may I ask you something seriously?”
   “You certainly have a gift for taking the brio out of a conversation. But, very well. Fire away.”
   “What do you know of the Trevilles?”
   “Ah-ha! Just as I thought! Curiosity. The Eighth Deadly Sin and notorious felinocide. It’s worse than lust. God only knows how many sordid affairs have been generated by sexual curiosity. There’s strong aphrodisiac in the question: I wonder how she’d be in bed? Nothing, of course, to the saltpeter of finding out. You ask what I know about the Trevilles? I know what the village knows. Nothing and everything. The Trevilles have been most unresponsive to the oblique questioning of the maids, merchants, and tradesmen they have dealt with during their year among us. Therefore, rustic logic feels free to confect—nay, obliged to confect a suitable biography in which to set the few thin facts known. There is a general feeling among the old women of Salies that it is their duty to create and promulgate fabrications and rumors replete with lurid details as a way to protect the Trevilles from the excessive imaginations of the gossips. What do you want to know?”
   “Everything.”
   “Fine. I shall share with you the subtle mйlange of fact and fancy that passes for truth hereabouts. In imitation of Genesis, I shall begin ‘in the beginning’—a dangerously close relative of ‘once upon a time,’ as every conscientious theologian knows. Well, the Trevilles came here from Paris a year ago. Three of them. A father and two children who, as I suppose even you have observed, are twins—a thing vaguely suspect in itself. They took a lease on the decrepit mansion called Etcheverria at terms that so delighted its owner that he rushed into town and bought drinks all around—an excess of generosity he has regretted ever since, and doubtless confessed as a sin of profligacy. Ever since their arrival, the Trevilles have lived as virtual recluses—a thing for which the village gossips cannot forgive them. May I offer you another little glass? No? It’s not charitable to flaunt your abstemiousness in this way, you know. One of those careless cruelties of Youth. The father is rumored to be something of a scholar, with all of the stigma appropriately attached to that nefarious craft. The son is accounted a wastrel, a snob, and—as he has not been caught climbing out of a peasant girl’s window—there are hints that he may be a bit of a pйdй. After all, he comes from Paris, and we all know what that means. But it is the daughter—dare I call her your young lady?—who has attracted most of the old crones’ attention. She has been seen walking alone in the fields from time to time. Walking alone.” Doctor Gros pumped his thick eyebrows up and down to underline the salacious implications of that. “Furthermore, it is said that she rides a bicycle. A bicycle, no less! Stare hard enough at that fact and you’ll find double—nay triple!—entendre. Also, she constantly wears white dresses, and we all know what that means. As she has never been observed doing anything in the least compromising, the gossips reason that she must do these things in secret. All in all, I’m afraid I must tell you that the Trevilles are the scandal of the community. Our local pride is bruised by their having chosen this corner of France in which to hide from whatever their sins and indiscretions may be. It’s as much as saying that we’re a Godforsaken, out-of-the-way backwater! And the fact that this is an accurate description of our community adds to the sting of it. There it is, Montjean. In a capsule, this is what is known and rumored about the Trevilles. And in addition there is the matter of the mother—whom no one has met and who is therefore rumored to be a dwarf, a Protestant, and left-handed. But I have a feeling this description is based on rather sketchy evidence.”
   “The mother is dead,” I said.
   “A dwarf, Protestant, left-handed, and dead? My, my. There is food for gossip. She’s a handsome one, your young lady. I congratulate you. A bit healthy for my own taste. Men of our profession must always be alert to the possibility that healthy people are doing it on purpose to ruin us.”
   “So there’s nothing really known about them at all.”
   “Nothing at all, as I have just said at some length.” The cafй waiter having delivered yet another Berger, Gros measured into his glass just enough water to cloud the drink without weakening it, then he stared at me for a moment before asking, “Well?”
   “Well what?”
   “Well what? What the devil are we talking about? Have you and your young lady…?” He made a palm-up gesture cutting across his chest.
   “I barely know her!”
   “Shame on you! Engaging in such intimacies with a girl you barely know. There’s the youth of today for you! No sense of decorum. You do realize, I hope, that you’ve contracted the disease.”
   “What disease?”
   “Love, man! I spotted the symptoms as you crossed the square pushing that silly bicycle. The vague, purposeless smile, the eye gone dim with inward-directed vision, the—”
   “Oh, really!”
   “Smitten, by God! Ah well, it happens to the best of us. In proof of which, I confess that I was once infected by love in my youth. But alas,” he drew a fluttering sigh, “it developed that she was a shallow thing attracted only by my physical beauty and ignorant of the depths of sensitivity beneath.”
   “I’d really rather not discuss—”
   “You have been good enough to share with me your conviction that mine is a quackish branch of medicine. As I recall, you were appalled that the nation of Pasteur could also be the nation of medicinal spas and curative waters. Well, for my part, I am appalled that the culture capable of producing de Sade could also produce the billet-doux and the tender assignation. Love resides in the loin, my boy, not in the heart.”
   “I should warn you that I take offense at this turn of talk.”
   “Oh, my, my! Forgive me! Misericorde!”
   “There is something further I would like to know.”
   “Oh, really? I would have taken it from your attitude that you knew everything—everything worth knowing, that is.”
   “Can you tell me anything about the house, Etcheverria?”
   “Only that it’s a terribly damp old place that might have been designed by a member of our profession specializing in lung disorders.”
   “You have never heard anything about its being haunted?”
   “Haunted? No. But I would be delighted to add that bit of information to the mass of rumor surrounding the Trevilles, if you wish.”
   “That won’t be necessary.”
   “Ah! Here come the municipal thieves, eager for their nightly shearing.” Indeed, the lawyer, Maоtre Lanne, and the village banker were approaching across the square. Each evening they joined Doctor Gros in games of bezique at which he inevitably won, not without muttered accusations of cheating. “I perform a useful service for these worthies, you know. I disemburden them of worldly wealth, making it possible for them to pass through the eye of a needle, as it were.”
   “I’ll be going.”
   “As you please. May I look forward to the pleasure of your company at the clinic tomorrow? Or have you decided to abandon medicine in favor of bicycle theft and girl molesting?”
   “I’ll be there in the morning. But… I may want to take off a bit of time in the afternoon.”
   “Ah-h-h, I see.” His voice was moist with conspiracy.
   “Mlle Treville will be coming into town,” I explained needlessly.
   “Ah-h-h, I see.”
   “No, you don’t see!” I felt at one time both anger at his implication of wrongdoing and a childish sense of pleasure at being teased about her… as though she were mine to be teased about. “She has to fetch her bicycle,” I clarified.
   “Ah-h-h, I see. Yes, of course. Her bicycle. To be sure.”
   “I offered to bring it out to her, but she… I don’t know why I am bothering to explain all this to you.”
   “Confession is good for the spirit, Montjean. It empties the soul, making space for more sin.”
   I rose as the village worthies arrived and excused myself for having to run along without the privilege of their conversation.
   After scribbling sketches and impressions in my journal and finding myself several times frozen in midsentence, staring through the page and smiling at nothing, I blew out my lamp and lay back against the bolster. The details of the room slowly emerged through the blackness as my eyes accustomed themselves to the moonglow that softly illuminated the curtain. All that night I drifted in and out of a sleep lightly brushed with images and imaginings that were not quite dreams.


* * *

   Incredible though it later seemed, I woke the next morning without a trace of Katya in my mind, without the slightest sense of anticipation, beyond a general feeling of good will and buoyancy. It was not until I had made my toilet and was crossing the square to the cafй where I took morning brioches and coffee that the thought that she was coming into town for her bicycle slipped casually into my mind, then leapt, as it were, from thin script to bold italics in an instant, and a smile brightened my face. It did not occur to me to use the word love in assessing my feelings. Katya had, to be sure, been either in my thoughts or just beyond the rim of them since I left her the day before, and I could recall with tactile memory the brush of her soft warm lips on my cheek. But love? No, I didn’t think of love. I was, however, ashamed to have forgotten all about her arrival for almost half an hour that morning. The lapse made me feel inconstant… unfaithful, almost.
   The day crawled by, the passage of time marked only by my trivial duties and tasks, and I began to fear that she would not come after all. The deterioration of the weather increased my apprehension as single dazzling clouds, like torn meringues, sailed lazily overhead and began to pile up on the horizon, thickening to a dark pewter. Would she decide not to dare the walk into Salies? What if she arrived, then a great storm broke, making it impossible for her to return home? We would have to seek shelter somewhere. Under the arcades of the square? No. Beneath a fine old tree? No. The gazebo hidden away at the end of the river park?
   … perhaps… my room?
   No! No. What nonsense! What an animal you are!
   The gazebo then. Yes. The heavy drops would drum on the zinc roof, making conversation impossible. Alone and screened from the world by a silver curtain of rain, we would sit in silence… sharing the silence… holding hands… not needing conversation… no, better yet, our relationship beyond conversation…
   “Would it be unreasonable of me to ask when you’re going to finish that prescription, Montjean?” Doctor Gros startled me by asking. “Or is there something beyond that window that has a prior claim on your attention?”
   I muttered some apology or another and plied my pestle with unnecessary vigor.
   Midafternoon the wind changed, the clouds were herded away to the west, and the sunlight returned—quite inconsiderately, it seemed to me.
   The day wore on and the slanting rays of the sun had plunged the arcades on the west side of the square into deep shadow when, for the thousandth time, my attention strayed from my pharmaceutical drudgery and I looked out my window in worried anticipation. She was just passing out of the dense shadow, and her white dress seemed to burst into brightness as she walked with her exuberant stride towards the clinic, hatless, but carrying a closed parasol. My heart twisted with pleasure.


* * *

   As I approached her on the square, still tugging on my linen jacket, a silly smile took possession of my face and would not release it, although I was sure every eye in the village followed my slightest gesture. She smiled too, but hers was charming where mine was inane.
   There was a cafй frequented by the lady patients, as it offered a thin pallid liquid that claimed to be English tea (then quite fashionable) served with small cakes which, as they were dry and tasteless, were assumed to be quintessentially British. I suggested that we take some refreshment there, after her long walk.
   “Exactly four thousand two hundred thirty-three paces, from my door to this spot,” she specified.
   “Exactly?” I asked in a tone of bantering admonishment.
   She shrugged. “For all I know, it might be. Frankly, I wouldn’t care to sit among the ladies and nibble at biscuits. May I have a citron pressй somewhere were we can sit in the sun?”

   “Of course. In fact my mood is so expansive that I might even offer you two citrons pressйs.”
   I am sure it was not just my imagination that the pairs of ladies strolling the square or sitting at the “English” cafй glanced rather often in the direction of our table, then looked away with studied indifference as they exchanged brief comments. And I felt there was a tone of insinuation, if not downright collaboration, in the excessive graciousness with which our waiter served us. But my annoyance at these intruders evaporated in the pleasure I took in our conversation, which might have appeared to an eavesdropping stranger to be banal and commonplace, but which seemed to me to be filled with significant things unsaid, meaningful gestures withheld, touching intimacies unexpressed. I asked after her brother, her father, and her ghost, all of whom, it appeared, were thriving—although that may not be the mot juste in the case of a ghost. Every moment after the first quarter hour I dreaded that she would say it was time for her to return home. But she seemed perfectly content to sit, sipping her citron pressй, while drawing me out with questions about the deprivations of my youth, my struggle for an education, my medical and literary aspirations. I spoke almost without pause for the better part of an hour, coming to the conclusion, in my youthful egoism, that she was a delightful and entertaining conversationalist.
   “It’s fascinating,” she said. “I’ve never known anyone so concerned with the future as you. My father lives in the distant past, and my brother and I have always lived from moment to moment, or at most from day to day. We never talk about the future. I suppose I have always thought of the future as a great heap of tomorrows each waiting its turn to become today.”
   “How then do you make plans?”
   “Plans? We don’t. That is… we don’t plan in the sense that we seek to achieve things, or become something. We do, of course, try our best to avoid embarrassments… difficulties.”
   “Difficulties of what kind?”
   She looked at me over the rim of her glass. “Oh, of all kinds.”
   “Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with your brother.”
   “I was not aware there was anything wrong with Paul.”
   “Maybe if he had met a few difficulties along the way, he wouldn’t be so bored with life, so superior in his attitudes.”
   “Aren’t you being a bit of a snob?”
   “Me? A snob?”
   “Not everyone has had a life of struggle to exercise him and make him strong. Not everyone is free to make a career, to anticipate a future.” Her smile was tinged with a sadness that drew my tenderest feelings towards her. Then, with a faint shift in the corners of her eyes, the smile became a look of serious examination as she searched the features of my face one by one in a way that quite discomfited me. “Dr. Montjean, are you aware that you are handsome?”
   “I beg your pardon?”
   “Most handsome men know it only too well, and their confident posturing is a nuisance. But you don’t seem to be aware of your beauty. It’s an attractive ignorance.”
   I shook my head, nonplussed. “Young women shouldn’t call young men beautiful.”
   “Why not?”
   “Why not? Well… it isn’t done.”
   “I don’t care about what’s done and not done.”
   “Nevertheless… and furthermore it’s embarrassing.”
   “Is it? Yes, I suppose it is. Well, I’m afraid we may have a more serious kind of embarrassment coming our way.” With a lift of her chin she indicated the sky, and I looked up to discover that while I had been absorbed in our chat, a shift of wind had brought the pewter-bellied clouds back over the village. Puffs of cool wind began to eddy up little dust swirls on the cobbled square.
   “It looks as though we shall have to wait the rain out,” I said, the image of the gazebo coming to mind.
   “Oh, but I can’t! Father doesn’t know I’ve come into the village. He would be distressed not to find me home, when he emerges from his ‘work’ for his tea.”
   “But… surely you can’t ride your bicycle back in the rain!”
   “I don’t see that I have any choice. I’ll make a race of it and, who knows, perhaps I can beat the rain back.”
   “I can’t allow it.”
   She looked at me with comic surprise. “You can’t allow it?”
   “I didn’t mean that exactly.”
   “I’m glad to hear it.”
   “Listen. Tell you what. I’ll get the clinic’s sulky and tie your machine on behind. And we’ll race the rain together.”
   “But… even if we won, surely you would get drenched on the way back.”
   “I don’t mind. In fact, I’d rather enjoy it.”
   She looked at me quizzically. “You know, I believe you would. Very well. Let’s race the rain.”


* * *

   When I asked Doctor Gros if I could use the sulky, he turned his eyes to the ceiling. “Aiding and abetting, the judges will call it! Accomplice before the fact! My career will be in ruins. My reputation will be… well, my career anyway will be damaged. I don’t suppose it’s any use to appeal to your sense of honor, but you might at least—Montjean!” he called after me. “You could have the decency to hear me out, you know!”


* * *

   Katya and I came within three minutes of winning our race against the weather, but from the point of view of our appearance when we arrived at the courtyard of Etcheverria, we might as well have lost by half an hour. We were soaked to the skin, as her white silk parasol was comically ineffective.
   Just as we turned up the poplar lane, the sky broke open and a brash of warm plump rain burst upon us. By the time I reined in at the courtyard, the leather of the rig was glistening with water, the mare was steaming, and Katya and I looked as though we had just been pulled from a river.
   Laughing at each other’s appearance, we entered the central hall, wiping the rain from our faces. My linen jacket hung grey and limp from my shoulders, and my trousers were heavy from waist to knee. For her part, Katya seemed delighted with the adventure, though her dress was sodden and wisps of hair were plastered to her temples and forehead. I suppose we were rather noisy in our excitement, for Paul Treville snatched open the door to the salon and glared at us in fury.
   “Katya! For the love of God! Father is working!”
   Our delight collapsed in an instant, and I stepped forward. “It’s all my fault, Monsieur Tre—”
   “I had assumed as much, Doctor. Katya, what could you have been thinking of?”
   “Really, Paul…” Her voice trailed off, and her whole demeanor seemed to shrink into a most uncharacteristic humility.
   “We’ll discuss it later,” the brother said. Then he turned and stared through me stonily. “When the good doctor has seen fit to deny us his company.”
   “Before I go, Monsieur Treville, I must tell you that I resent your tone, not only on my own behalf, but on that of Katya.”
   “What right have you to resent anything I do or say? And by what right do you address my sister by her given name?”
   I turned to Katya to make my farewells and was struck by her uncertain, deflated attitude. But it was her slight movement away from me as I began to speak that stung me and left me with nothing to say. I turned back to her brother. “You are quite right, of course, to say that I shouldn’t address Mlle Treville by her first name. It was the lapse of the moment. But I assure you, sir, that—”
   “You need assure me, Doctor, of nothing… save for your intention to depart immediately.”
   With my whole being, I yearned to hit him in the face. But I resisted for Katya’s sake. Gathering together what dignity my drenched condition and pounding pulse permitted, I bowed curtly and went to the door.
   “Just a moment, Doctor!” It is impossible to describe the sudden change in Paul Treville’s tone of voice from that of the haughty, outraged aristocrat to one of concerned fatigue. “Just a moment, if you please.” He closed his eyes and drew a long breath. “Do forgive me. I have been ungracious. Katya, could you look to that new girl in the kitchen? Father will want his supper soon, and she has the appearance of one who would open an egg with a battering ram.”
   Without a word to me, without even looking at me, Katya left the hall, her head down and her shoulders rounded.
   “And Katya?” Paul arrested her at the entrance to the housekeeping quarters, where she stopped without turning around. He smiled sadly. “Do warm yourself at the fire, and dry your hair. You look frightful.” She nodded and departed. He looked after her for a moment and sighed; then he turned to me. “Would you join me in the salon, Dr. Montjean? I’ve a fire going, and you look as though you could do with a little drying out yourself.
   “Brandy?” he asked, following me into the salon.
   “Thank you, no,” I said stiffly, uncomfortable and confused by his sudden change of attitude, and even more disturbed by Katya’s humble, almost servile, reaction to his burst of anger. The fire in the marble hearth was inviting, but I did not approach it, still too angry with him to accept any hospitality at his hands.
   “Please sit down,” he said as he poured out two large brandies, not having heard, or choosing to ignore, my refusal. With only his left hand free, his empty right sleeve pinned against his bound shoulder, he carried the brandy glasses rather precariously between his fingers. I accepted the glass, not wishing to appear petty, and when he took a chair beside the fire, there was nothing for me to do but join him, my chill skin absorbing the welcome warmth, whether I wanted it or not.
   “I take it your sister failed to tell you that she was coming into Salies to collect her bicycle,” I said with some distant dignity.
   “You take it correctly. But then, she is not in the habit of accounting to me for her actions. But for more than an hour I have been searching everywhere for her. Consideration for others is not one of Katya’s attributes.”
   “We took some refreshment at a cafй on the square. The weather turned threatening, so I offered to carry her and her machine home. There was nothing more to it than—”
   “My dear fellow, I require no explanation of Katya’s behavior. And if I did, I should ask for it from her. My sister’s character and breeding are such that her actions are not dependent on the moral rectitude of her company. Good heavens! Did you imagine for a moment that I thought—” He burst into a laugh that was rather insulting. “No, no, Montjean. I am sure there is nothing but casual friendship between you. After all…” He waved his glass towards me, but was kind enough not to complete the thought. “No, Katya’s been kept too much to herself by circumstances, and hers is too open and generous a personality to enjoy being alone. However, we live—I need hardly remind you—in a small-minded and narrow community where reputations can fall victim to rumor on the slightest foundation.”
   “In fact, I did fail to consider the evil of local gossip. That was thoughtless of me. But, after all? A glass of citron pressй and half an hour’s conversation in the public square? What could they make of that?”
   “Everything. As my family has come, to its sorrow, to know, having been victims of savage gossip often enough. Therefore…” He finished off his brandy and took my empty glass with his to the side table. “…I feel justified in demanding that you do something to retrieve Katya’s reputation.”
   “Yes, of course. Anything. But… what?”
   “The honorable thing, of course.”
   “And that is?” I asked with open astonishment.
   He measured out the brandy with more precision than was necessary, taking his time before turning to me and saying, “I want you to call on her at her home, as a young man should. Be seen with her in the company of her family. I hope I do not ask too much?” He smiled, and I was struck by how, particularly in profile, he was the very image of Katya. There was something reassuring in this. And something disconcerting as well.
   “I should, of course, be delighted to call on Mlle Treville.”
   He shrugged. “That goes without saying. But I must require that you join me in an innocent little subterfuge.”
   I rose to receive my glass and used the opportunity to cross to the other side of the hearth to complete my drying out. “What little subterfuge is that?”
   “It concerns my father. It is imperative—absolutely imperative—that my father never get the impression that you are visiting Katya as a young man visits a young woman. Is that understood?”
   “But why not?”
   He ignored the question, leaving me to understand that his insistence was reason enough. “During supper last night, my father noticed that I was one-armed—really quite a feat of observation for him, lost as he is in his world of medieval village life. We shall introduce you at supper as my doctor, and your visits here will be for the ostensible purpose of attending to my injury—assisting Father Time, as it were.”
   “Am I to take supper with you then?”
   He grinned. “My dear fellow, we could hardly send you out into the rain, now could we?”
   “And yet you seemed perfectly capable of that not ten minutes ago.”
   “I have always admired social flexibility in others, and I seek to develop that quality in myself.”
   “Flexibility? Capriciousness, more like. May I tell you something quite frankly?”
   “Oh, dear. Well, if you absolutely must.”
   “I consider you to be willful and thoughtless of others’ feelings. Not ten minutes ago, you were storming about, the perfect image of the outraged brother, when you knew quite well you had nothing to be outraged about. You spoke offensively to me and, what is more, you quite crushed your sister. Then suddenly you became all reason and friendship—even to the ridiculous point of playing the matchmaker. And that when neither of us has the slightest reason to believe that Mlle Treville is the least bit interested in me. I believe anyone would describe such behavior as childish and irresponsible.”
   Paul stared into the fire and I fell silent, my heart pounding, surprised by my frankness and daring. Then he looked languidly over at me. “Pardon me? You were saying?”
   “I am sure you heard me.”

   “In fact I did. But I did you the service of pretending not to. So far as your supper here goes, let me warn you that we live meagerly, if not meanly. Our peasant servants cook to their peasant taste, so our evening meal consists of a soup more notable for its density than its flavor, crusts of the local bread, which could easily double as paving material, and a garnish of greenish oddments plucked from the breast of the earth. The kindest description of our repasts would be… Spartan. They belong to that vast category of unpleasant events that we are enjoined to indulge in because they build character.” He rose. “Now, if leaving you to your own company for a few moments does not expose me to accusations of abandoning you to dull society, I shall go tell Katya to have another place laid. Who knows?” He grinned. “She may even be pleased. She has a capacity for deriving pleasure from the most insignificant things.” And he left the salon.
   I wandered the room absently, examining the furnishings, which were a queer mйlange of heavy, ugly objects in dubious repair, and fine expensive old pieces. I assumed it to be a mixture of furniture left behind by the leasor and a few treasured things the Trevilles had brought with them. As I passed the double doors leading to the hall, I could not help overhearing parts of a whispered conversation between Katya and Paul who were standing without. Only occasional words were audible, but the timbre of the exchange was intense and strained.
   “…of course. But was that wise, Paul?”
   “What…. our options?”
   (Something incomprehensible from Katya.)
   “I assume…. fond of….?”
   (A pause) “Yes…. very nice.”
   “….sorry, Katya. If only…. different.”
   “It’s pointless…. the impossible. Perhaps…. explain to Dr. Montjean?”
   “….foolish. Very foolish indeed!”
   “Yes, you’re right, of course. Well,…. for supper. Papa just rang.”


* * *

   Papa’s “ringing” to announce that he was done with his studies for the day and ready for his supper was a topic of conversation, as the four of us sat around the oaken table in the dining room.
   “It’s not exactly accurate to say he rings,” Katya told me, smiling from beyond the encrusted old candelabrum. “This poor pile of a house is falling apart and almost nothing functions. The kitchen signal bells have long ago disappeared. But one can hear the scratching of the wire in its channel quite clearly, so it works in its own fashion after all.”
   I thought it delightful the way Katya maintained light chat at table with all the grace of an experienced hostess. So much did I endow her with exceptional gifts that I was surprised to discover she also possessed those common to all well-brought-up women.
   “Perhaps,” Paul Treville said, “we could say that Father scratches for his supper… or does that have an unfortunately canine implication?”
   Monsieur Treville looked up from the rich potage that had occupied his attention since sitting down, and he blinked. “I beg your pardon? Did you speak to me?”
   “More of than to, Papa,” Paul said.
   Monsieur Treville nodded. “Aha! I thought so. Yes, I thought so.” He turned to me. “So you are a doctor, are you?”
   “My superior in the village, Dr. Gros, might dispute that, sir. But in fact I have leapt all the barriers of doubt and memorized all the rote trivia required to affix the word Doctor to my name.” I blush even now to recall those memorized set pieces I used to trot out when the occasion presented itself.
   “Yes, but are you a doctor or not?” the old man asked, inadvertently deflating my pompous phrasing by failing to comprehend it.
   “Yes, sir, I am.” From the first moment, I took a liking to Monsieur Treville and his vague, absent-minded ways, although we had been at the table the better part of ten minutes before he realized I was sitting amongst them. His large, open features, his thick grey hair tousled with fingers raked through it nervously as he studied, his clear eyes sparkling with intelligence and almost boyish energy whenever he spoke of something of interest to him—all of these were my ideal image of the kindly old scholar. Then too, he was Katya’s father.
   “Doctor, eh?” Monsieur Treville said. “Oh yes, of course!” He turned to Paul. “You had some sort of accident, didn’t you? Fell over something, wasn’t it?”
   “I fell off the roof, Papa, while I was trying to catch clouds in a net. Fortunately, I landed headfirst in a pool of crocodiles and that broke my fall.”
   “Yes, yes, I remember. So you’re a doctor, young man. That’s very interesting. Your studies didn’t happen to lead you to an interest in medieval village life by any chance, did they?”
   I glanced in confusion at Katya, who smiled impishly. “Ah… well, not in any very direct way, sir. But I’ve always been fascinated by the subject.”
   Monsieur Treville’s face lit up. “Oh? Have you indeed? What aspects particularly interest you?”
   “Yes, Doctor,” Paul said, leaning forward with mock interest. “Do tell us.”
   Katya gave him a reproving frown, but he raised his eyebrows in blandest innocence, as I stammered out, “Well… the whole topic is fascinating. Particularly… ah… particularly the medical… ah…”
   “The plague!” Monsieur Treville injected. “Yes, I am sure the arrival of the Black Death in ‘48/’49 would be of particular interest to a doctor.”
   “That would be 13 48 and ‘49,” young Treville clarified helpfully.
   Monsieur Treville frowned at his son and blinked several times. “Did someone say something about crocodiles? What’s all this about crocodiles?”
   “I didn’t understand that completely myself, Father,” Paul confessed. “Something to do with the Great Plague perhaps. Could you clarify that for us, Doctor?”
   “No, no, young man,” Monsieur Treville said laying his hand on my arm and chuckling. “Rats! Rats and lice. Nothing to do with crocodiles at all. Possibly the fact that the plague entered Europe through Mediterranean ports gave birth to this fiction about crocodiles—though I confess that I’ve never run across the legend myself. You wouldn’t happen to recall where you read it, would you?”
   Katya came to my rescue, diverting the conversation into light channels until dinner had progressed to the fruit and a disk of the strong, salty local cheese, at which Paul poked distastefully with the tip of his knife. I could sense that Katya was pleased with me, pleased with my evident liking for her father and with his delight at having someone new with whom to talk. My romantic imagination staged domestic daydreams concerning an at-home dinner with the brother-in-law and father-in-law visiting our modest (but charming) home, and in neglect of my social responsibilities I allowed myself to become lost in these pleasant reveries to such a depth that I was quite surprised when Monsieur Treville’s voice intersected my egoistic wanderings.
   “…or don’t you agree, Doctor?”
   “Ah… yes. Yes! I do indeed agree. Yes, indeed.”
   Monsieur Treville’s eyes sparkled with interest. “That’s fascinating, Doctor. I need hardly tell you that very few modern scholars of medieval life share our view on this. Would you mind telling me what evidence brought you to this opinion?”
   “What evidence? Ah… well, not so much any given single bit of evidence as… ah… as the general impression I… ah…”
   Katya earned my undying gratitude when she placed her hand on my arm and interrupted, saying, “Now you two mustn’t spend the whole evening talking about things that Paul and I don’t understand.”
   “I don’t mind,” Paul said. “In fact, I’d be delighted to hear Montjean’s response.” He smiled at me broadly. Then he made a sudden motion, and I realized that Katya had kicked him under the table.
   “No,” she said, “I won’t have it. We shall take our coffee in the salon like well-bred people, and we shall talk of trivial and amusing things, as we were taught to do when we were young.” She stood and offered me her arm. “Dr. Montjean?”
   For half an hour, as we four sat around the good fire in the hearth, Katya was as good as her word, guiding the conversation from one subject to another with such subtle skill that each of us—even Paul—had his moment to shine forth and appear witty and well-informed. Brandy was served with the coffee, and I noticed that Paul refilled his glass more often than was wise and ended with sitting deep in his chair with a leaden and dour attitude that bordered on the inhospitable, but my delight in and admiration of Katya over-weighed my feelings towards her brother and I was left with the impression that I had never passed a more pleasant and entertaining evening, though I could recall no single event of particular moment.
   Paul broke the spell by rising suddenly and saying, “I’m afraid that Katya should be going to bed soon.”
   “Really, Paul—” she protested.
   “No, no Kiki.” Paul crossed to her and put his arm around her waist. “You’ve risked catching a cold, being out in the rain. Now you must go to bed, pull the covers up to your nose, and count crocodiles. You’ll be asleep in no time. Father and I will entertain Dr. Montjean.”
   “Have you been out in the rain?” Monsieur Treville asked Katya with concern.
   “Not really, Father,” Paul answered. “Just a figure of speech.”
   Monsieur Treville blinked. “Figure of speech?”
   “Yes, and a silly and ineffective one too. I promise I’ll never use it again. Now, up you go, Kiki.”
   “Good-night, Papa,” Katya said, giving him a kiss on the cheek. “And good-night to you, Jean-Marc Montjean.” She held her hand out for me to press. I was pleased at the way she had devised of using my given name so soon in our acquaintance. “Will I have the pleasure of seeing you so soon?”
   “Never fear,” Paul said. “The doctor has promised—or perhaps it was a threat—to come by tomorrow to bind up my wounds. No doubt we shall be able to persuade him to take a cup of tea with us.”
   “I shall look forward to it, Mlle Treville,” I said, my eyes full of her.
   “So shall I.”
   After she left, Monsieur Treville settled back in his chair as though for a good long talk and asked me how long I had been devoted to the study of the Black Death….
   ….An hour later, when finally Paul was seeing me to the door, the rain had lightened to a frying hiss on the gravel outside. He had not been sparing of the brandy, and there was something beyond nonchalance in the way he leaned against the archway of the hall door.
   “You’ve done well, Montjean. I am sure Father hasn’t the slightest hint that your interest in us is not solely medical. That bespeaks an admirable streak of duplicity in your nature. You really should cultivate this gift, not only as a means of surviving in a world of rogues and merchants, but as leavening in a personality that is altogether too serious and sincere to be interesting.”
   “Are you always this uncivil, Treville?”
   “Not always. You bring out the best in me.”
   “I’m delighted to be of service. May I wish you a goodnight?”
   “Please do.”


* * *

   Before the trap had reached the end of the poplar lane, the rain stopped, and as the mare walked comfortably back to Salies through the night air rinsed clean of dust, I troubled over several events of the evening. There was that strange, tense conversation I had overheard between Katya and Paul. And there was Paul’s warning that his father must know nothing of my interest in Katya while, so far as I could judge, the old man was a gentle pedant with no harm in him. Perhaps most troubling of all was the fact that I rather liked Paul Treville, although I had every reason not to. Was it his physical resemblance to Katya that drew me to forgive his adolescent discourteousness? I didn’t think so. Not that alone, anyway. There was a kind of desperate melancholy in the man, not quite concealed by his waspish wit, that made me sympathize with a person of lucid if brittle intelligence who had no outlet for his energies and mind in our rural corner of the Basque country.
   Why did he accept this self-imposed isolation from the world he was born to, the world in which his gifts and talents were valued? Why, indeed, were the Trevilles living in an ancient heap of stone so far from their Paris? Katya had made an allusion to their being here for their health, but I could see no evidence of ill-health, and I could see every evidence, in Monsieur Treville’s eagerness to share ideas and concepts with me, of a hunger for the civilized society they had left.
   In a selfish way, of course, I was delighted that they were here in Salies. How else would I ever have met Katya?
   Katya… And the rest of my ride into town was occupied with fabricating little scenes and swatches of dialogue between Katya and me.


* * *

   Directly the clinic closed at three the next afternoon, I borrowed Doctor Gros’s trap again and rode out to Etcheverria, arriving in time for tea, which was taken on the terrace overlooking the derelict garden. Paul’s attitude had changed totally; he was full of light chat and jokes that had no trace of vitriol in them. And when Monsieur Treville joined us from his study, Paul asked him about his work with every evidence of genuine interest and concern, which was a far cry from the tone of impish baiting that had colored his conversation the night before.
   At first, Monsieur Treville seemed confused to see me at their tea table, and there was an uncomfortable moment when I was afraid he didn’t recognize me and hadn’t the slightest idea who I was. But Katya used my title several times until, with a little start of comprehension, her father said, “Ah, yes! You’re the fellow who’s deeply involved in studies of the Black Death, aren’t you? Yes. Fascinating subject. Fascinating.”
   Paul excused himself after only one cup of the thin tisane Katya served, claiming that there were a thousand things demanding his attention, so he had best take a little nap and give them a chance to solve themselves under the influence of his benign neglect. Monsieur Treville rose and pled the demands of scholarship, shaking my hand in farewell and cautioning me not to devote myself overly much to my study of medieval medicine, as I was a young man and must not allow life to pass me by.
   Katya smiled after her departing father and shook her head affectionately. “He likes you, Jean-Marc Montjean.”
   “I like him, too.”

   She looked at me, her grey eyes soft and smiling. “Yes, I know. And that pleases me. But you may have to bone up a little on things medieval.”
   “I shall make it my constant study.”
   She laughed lightly and rose. “Shall we stroll down to my library?”
   “You speak of the library that disguises itself so cleverly as a half-ruined summerhouse?”
   “What other library have I? Come along.”
   And for the better part of two hours we chatted, she sitting in the battered wicker chair that was the gazebo’s only furnishing or perched upon the balustrade rail, while I sat on the steps or leaned against the frame of the latticed arch entrance. Our conversation ranged freely, shallow and deep, now and ago, serious and light-hearted, personal and global, the topic pivoting on a word or branching off in a new direction under the impulse of a non sequitur image or idea that appeared in one of our minds or the other. Time acted in a most paradoxical way: on the one hand, it was suspended and frozen, on the other it fled like water through our fingers.
   I accepted her invitation to return for tea the next day, when again we chatted about everything and nothing. And so it was the following day, and the day after that. In my memory, all the hours we passed in the summerhouse blend together as a prolonged, but all-too-brief, time spent sitting in the dappled light, concealed in the overgrown garden, while above the trees the sky was always an ardent blue and the air was always cool and gently moving in the perfect weather of that July.
   We came to using first names. We came to sharing long silences without that sense of social embarrassment that strangers have. I fell into the habit of groaning at her puns, even though some of them were admirable tricks of sound and sense requiring a considerable exercise of literary or political allusion. She came to teasing me for being typically Basque in my unlikely combination of dour earnestness and theatrical romanticism.
   I was particularly fascinated by an ambivalence of mood that was so especially Katya’s. Most of the time, she was vividly alive and alert to everything around her: she pointed out birds in branches that I could not discover even when she directed my gaze to the spot; she took pleasure in the close examination of the form and structure of the petals and leaves of such flowers as had survived the long neglect the garden had suffered; she delighted in the feel of the sun on her face and the smell of the heated summer air; she loved to play with words and ideas, twisting and re-forming them with her particular sense of the ridiculous. But at other moments—rather rarely—she would suddenly retire within herself, sometimes in midsentence, and I could tell from the vague and distant look in her eyes that she was elsewhere, not in this garden, not in this world… not with me. She would gaze in silence across the garden, alone and serene in her thoughts, then there would be a slight flicker in her eyes and she would glance at me, and I knew she had returned from her reverie.
   She would joke about it, saying something like, “Well, I’m back. Were there any letters for me while I was away?”
   And I would say something like, “No, but there was a telegram from your brother. It seems his grandson is getting married next month.”
   “Oh, really?” she would laugh. “Have I been gone all that long?”
   “Very long. Nearly a minute. And very far away. Nearly beyond my reach.”
   Fragments of the things we talked about during those delicious afternoon hours return to me even now, fresh and whole, like those snatches of melody from one’s youth that slip back unsolicited from the hidden reaches of the memory. Often we exchanged moments and incidents from our childhoods, shards of ourselves shared unselfconsciously, and not so much shared as remembered aloud. She recalled that she was once given a blue silk dress with a bow that she loved so much she saved it for some very special occasion, saved it so long that when she at last found a sufficiently worthy event, it was too small to be worn. She had wept bitterly. But she kept the dress and had it even now. And I told her of a bully in my mountain village who enjoyed taunting me because I did particularly well in school. He took up the practice of slapping me on the back of my head, which expression of subtle wit delighted the other children. I used to cry with rage and shame, but I never dared to challenge the bigger lad until my wise old uncle took me aside and explained that, while the bully was strong, I had the advantage of being quick and adroit. And, what is more, I would be strengthened by the rightness of my cause. So, the next time that fat butcher’s son hectored me, I put up my fists and took a stand… only to experience the soundest thrashing of my life, with my nose bloodied and my lip broken. And when I reported the event to my uncle, he shook his head and advised me not to be so stupid in future as to pick fights with bigger boys. And she told me of the shadow of a tree branch at night on the wall of her bedroom that looked like a monkey and used to frighten her each time a storm made it dance, rippling insanely over the draperies. She would hide under her covers and peek out through a little hole, fascinated, horrified, but unable to look away from the dancing monkey because she had convinced herself that it could not harm her so long as she kept her eyes on it. She dared not even blink. And I told her of the one time I cheated in school and…
   There is no purpose in recounting everything we shared. I am sure the reader has been in love, and remembers.
   There was no physical intimacy between us, to be sure. We didn’t kiss; I didn’t even hold her hand. Our only contact was when she slipped her hand into the crook of my arm as we walked down to the summerhouse or back from it. But even now, years later, I can still feel the pressure and warmth of that hand, as though my nerves had memories independent of my mind.
   There was one occasion when she did touch me, come to think of it. We were chatting when she suddenly put her hand upon mine and hushed me with a gesture.
   “What is it?” I asked.
   She remained perfectly still for a long moment, looking to the side of the summerhouse with close attention. Then she looked back to me and smiled. “You didn’t see her?”
   “Her? Who?”
   She evaluated me quizzically, as though wondering if I were trying to trick her. Then she shrugged, “Oh, never mind. It’s nothing.”
   “No, tell me.” Then a thought crossed my mind. “You didn’t see the ghost that’s supposed to haunt this garden, did you? Is that it?”
   “She’s not a ghost.”
   “Oh, yes. I forgot. Spirit, then.”
   Katya gazed at me for a moment; then she shook her head and smiled. “I really must be getting back to the house. The local girl working for us requires reminding, or she would never start supper, and poor Father would have to go to bed hungry.”
   “Stay with me a little longer. Send the ghost to remind her. It’s an experience she’ll never forget.”
   “I won’t have you joke about the spirit… poor thing. Now you go along. But if you wish, you may join us for dinner tonight. Father has asked after you.”
   “I accept with pleasure.”
   Before we parted on the terrace, I remembered that I had forgotten to give her that day’s pebble. It had become a joke—and a little more than a joke—between us for me to present her with a pebble upon each meeting. I found it in my pocket and offered it with the comically sober ceremony we had fallen into.
   “Thank you very much, Jean-Marc. It’s the finest pebble I’ve received since… oh, I can’t remember when. Yesterday, I think.”
   “I’ll see you this evening, then?”
   “Yes. Until then.”


* * *

   It rained that evening, and once again I arrived with dripping hair and sodden jacket. During dinner there were the expected jokes about my bringing the rain with me whenever I visited. I felt a bit uncomfortable at the table, because Katya, fearful that I would catch a cold in my wet coat, had insisted that I change it for one of Paul’s brocade smoking jackets, which was a little too small for me and a great deal fancier than anything I was used to wearing.
   Paul squinted at me across the table. “I wonder, Montjean, if I look that silly in my smoking jacket. Or are you one of those rare fellows who can diminish the effect of any garment he wears?”
   “I think he looks charming,” Katya said.
   “Do you indeed?”
   I had been aware of a regular erosion of graciousness on Paul’s part since that first tea, when he had been surprisingly pleasant. His principal method of letting me know that he was not totally pleased to see me every day at the tea table was an affected surprise, followed by a declaration that he was delighted to see me there again—or was it still?
   After a longish silence, during which he had been lost in his thoughts, Monsieur Treville leaned forward and said, “You know, I have been thinking about your having to change your coat to protect your health, Dr…. ah… Doctor.”
   “Have you really?” Paul said. “How fascinating.”
   “Yes. Man is so fragile! It’s almost frightening to contemplate. We live in a universe in which the constant temperature is nearly absolute zero. No life could survive in the millions of miles that separate the specks of light we call stars. And that space makes up the overwhelming majority of the universe. Nor could any life as we know it exist in the thousands of degrees of heat on the stars. Life—all of life—is restricted to the insignificant little particles of dust revolving about the stars… these planets. And most of them are either too hot or too cold for the survival of man. In the thousands of degrees that separate the cauldrons of the stars and the lifeless cold of space, Man can survive in only the narrowest conceivable band of temperature—only a few degrees. Indeed, without shelter and heat, we can survive in only a few places on our own miniature planet. Men die of heat prostration at thirty-five degrees, and of exposure at minus twenty-five. And even within those strict limits, we can catch cold and perish of pneumonia by getting a little damp, even during the finest summer in memory. It’s both frightening and wonderful to consider how precarious our existence is and how the slightest change in our lives can snuff us out.”
   “The trick then,” Paul said, “is not to permit change to enter our lives.”
   I glanced at him and found his level gaze upon me, his eyes creased with an arctic smile. Then he took a quick breath and said, “You’re a remarkable conversationalist, Father. As children we were trained that in polite conversation we should avoid religion, politics, and, above all, functional matters. We were told that the only totally safe subject is the weather. And here you have proven that even the weather can be dangerous. What do you think, Montjean? Do you view Mankind as teetering in precarious balance between sunburn and the sniffles?”
   “I am more moved by the wonder of our existence than by the danger of it. That we exist at all is, as Monsieur Treville has pointed out, amazing. But the real marvel is that we know we exist and we ponder the amazement of it.”
   Paul frowned. “Did I forget to list metaphysics along with religion, politics, and biological functions as maladroit subjects for polite conversation?”
   “Oh, the metaphysical can be a fine exercise for the mind,” Katya said. “But the physical world has its delights as well. Consider how thoughtful Nature has been all this summer. She brings rain only at night. We have the refreshment of it, and the earth has the nourishment of it, but not a single day is spoiled. It’s a wonder She didn’t think of so admirable a system earlier.”
   Monsieur Treville leaned towards his daughter and patted her hand. “I notice you speak of Nature as being feminine, darling.”
   “Yes, of course. Fertility and all that. And the concept of ‘Father Nature’ is patently silly.” She rose. “Which of course leads us to the question of taking our coffee in the salon.”
   As I followed Katya across the hall to the salon, my attention was so totally absorbed by the beauty of the nape of her neck, revealed by her high-piled coiffure, that I was startled when the trailing edge of the storm passed over, delivering a final barrage of thunder.
   “Good Lord, Montjean,” Paul laughed. “You jumped as though you’d seen a ghost. You must have been miles away.”
   I smiled. “Not miles away, but perhaps months away.” This meant nothing to anyone but me, but it gave me pleasure to say it aloud nonetheless.
   “What’s all this about ghosts?” Monsieur Treville asked.
   “Nothing important, Father,” Paul said, as he knelt to stir the fire.
   “No, tell me. I want to know.”

   Paul sighed. “Very well. Montjean is lost in reverie… thunder cracks… Montjean jumps and gasps… son offers inane comment about ghosts… Montjean parries with incomprehensible prattle about miles and months… and there you have it. The entire gripping episode.”
   “I don’t understand,” Monsieur Treville confessed.
   To divert us from this silly tangle, I joked, “You should be used to ghosts, harboring as you do your share of them.”
   Paul’s shoulders stiffened, the piece of firewood poised in his hand. “What do you mean by that?” he asked without turning to me.
   I shrugged. “Nothing really. I was merely referring to the ghost in your garden.”
   “Oh, I see,” Monsieur Treville said, sitting in his favorite chair before the fire. Then he blinked and frowned. “Which ghost is that?”
   “Local tradition has it that your garden is haunted by a…” I glanced at Katya with a smile to which she did not respond. “…by a charming young spirit who resents being called a ghost.”
   Paul’s voice was flat. He spoke staring into the hearth, his back to the room. “Have you seen this spirit yourself, Montjean?”
   “No, not actually. But I have testimony of its existence from a perfectly impeccable source.” I could not comprehend Katya’s frown and slight shake of her head.
   Paul set the stick of wood down deliberately and rose to face me. “You don’t mind if we don’t take coffee this evening, do you, Doctor? My poor battered shoulder is giving me pain, so I think I’ll make an early night of it.”
   “Nonsense,” Katya said. “Of course we shall take coffee. You, however, may go to your room if you must.”
   “No, no, no,” Paul said. “I wouldn’t dream of leaving and running the risk of missing Father’s insights into the climactic frailty of Man or Dr. Montjean’s invaluable metaphysical footnotes. I have the rounding out of my education to consider. By the way, ‘invaluable’ is the opposite of ‘valuable,’ isn’t it?”
   “Someone mentioned ghosts and spirits just now,” Monsieur Treville said, accepting his coffee and brandy from Katya with a negligent smile of thanks. “I’ve always been fascinated by the role played by the supernatural in the life of medieval man. Of course, Doctor, you are familiar with Louis Duvivier’s work on the subject, in which he presents the attractive, if rather weakly substantiated, contention that Christianity maintained its sway over the half-barbaric minds of the….”
   ….Half an hour later, Katya interrupted her father’s involute monologue by kissing him on the forehead and saying that she should be off to bed. I rose and took her offered hand.
   “Will we see you tomorrow for tea, Jean-Marc?”
   “Yes, of course. Good-night, Katya.”
   “Good-night. Are you coming up, Paul?”
   “As soon as I’ve seen our guest off.” Paul’s speech was slightly slurred in result of his excessive recourse to the brandy.
   As Katya left the salon, Monsieur Treville pulled out his watch and said, “My goodness! How the evening has slipped by! And I have work I promised myself to finish before tomorrow. Still, it was an intriguing conversation. I must confess that I am addicted to the give and take of intelligent conversation. It’s fast becoming a lost art. Well, then! If you will excuse me?” And he left.
   I remained standing, prepared to be on my way, but Paul didn’t rise from his chair. Instead, he hooked his leg over the arm and waved towards the brandy bottle. “Will you have another glass before you go?”
   “I think not, thank you. Why do you laugh?”
   “It’s just that you look so damned silly in my smoking jacket. I suppose I would look ridiculous if I were dressed up as a Basque shepherd. It’s a matter of what one is born to, I shouldn’t wonder.”
   I had quite forgotten that I was wearing his jacket, and I took it off to exchange it for my own, which was hanging near the fire to dry out.
   “You are Basque, aren’t you?” Paul pursued.
   “Yes, I am. My natal village isn’t far from here up in the mountains. Why do you ask?”
   “Just idle curiosity. Montjean isn’t a Basque name, after all. One expects names like Utuburu, or Zabola, or Elizondo… something darkly passionate like that.”
   Actually, my name is Basque… a Frenchification of the stems mendi and jaun, meaning ‘mountain man.’ But I cannot bring myself to believe that you’re really interested in the sources of my name.”
   “Fascinated beyond description, old fellow,” he said in his laziest drawl. “But there is something I would like to talk to you about. You’re sure you won’t accept a last brandy?”
   “Very well, if you wish.”
   “There’s my gracious friend.” But he did not pour it out; instead, he waved towards the bottle and left me to serve myself. “I’ve been reconsidering the matter of allowing you to visit Katya.”
   “Oh? Have you?”
   “Hm-m. Yes.”
   “I wasn’t aware that your sister required your permission to entertain guests.”
   He laughed. “Did you notice your tone of voice? That could have been me speaking. Do you think you’ve caught something from my jacket?”
   “What possible objection could you have to my passing an hour or two each afternoon with Katya?”
   “Ah yes, I’ve noticed that you and she have begun using first names.”
   “There’s nothing to that. We talk together a good deal. It would be stilted for us to avoid Christian names.”
   “Yes, I suppose so. You asked what objection I could have to your passing an hour or two each day with her in what is probably trivial and surely tedious conversation. Nothing in the world, old boy. But you are young and might be considered attractive by some; and she is young and attractive to all; and it is in the nature of things that they lead to other things.”
   “I find your implication offensive.”
   “Please don’t play the outraged Gascon with me. What a bore d’Artagnan must have been, always so sensitive of his imagined honor.”
   “I think you’ve had too much to drink.”
   “What an observant fellow you are! Look, I’m not accusing you and Katya of anything. But you’re both healthy people, and romantics. God gave Adam and Eve the run of the garden, and the next thing you know they’re swapping apples. It’s perfectly natural.” He rose and crossed the room to me. “But I don’t care how natural it is, I don’t want you and Katya swapping apples. Not even nibbles of apples. Is that understood?”
   I rose. “I think I should leave.”
   “What a wonderful idea. But I suppose you only meant that you should leave for tonight and that you’ll be back, bad-penny-like, at tea time tomorrow.”
   I didn’t answer him. I was too angry, and I didn’t trust myself not to hit him. But he followed me to the door.
   “Tell me, Montjean. Have you kissed my sister?”
   “Not that it’s any of your business, but no, I have not.”
   “Not even held her hand?”
   “Not even that,” I lied. “No nibbles at all. Now allow me to wish you a good night.”
   “Just a moment! Listen to me. I want your absolute promise that you will not attempt the slightest intimacy with my sister. Do I have it?”
   “Frankly, Treville, I consider your overly protective attitude towards Katya to be unhealthy.”
   “Of course it’s unhealthy. We’re an unhealthy family. Didn’t Katya tell you we were down in this forsaken hole for our health. But the state of my family’s health has nothing to do with the promise I demand from you. Well?”
   I could feel the Basque blood pounding at my temples. When I spoke, I kept my voice very quiet and very controlled. “If you were not Katya’s brother, I would knock you on your butt.”
   “My, my. What a master of repartee! Wouldn’t it be a bit difficult for you to smash your fist into a face so identical to hers?”
   My eyes flicked from one of his to the other. Then my shoulders slumped. He was absolutely right. It would have been impossible.
   “It’s a good thing you have reconsidered, because if you had so much as made an angry gesture, I would have had the pleasure of punishing you, severely and adroitly. I have not had occasion to tell you that I was a champion kick-boxer in Paris. Not that I enjoyed all the sweat and grunting of athletics, but there was a period when it was fashionable for young men of my class to be proficient at kick-boxing. Allowed one to deal with street ruffians without soiling one’s gloves, you see. So naturally I became remarkably proficient.”
   “Oh, naturally.” I drew a calming breath, then bowed curtly. “Good-night.” It was only with the exercise of restraint that I was able to close the door gently behind me.


* * *

   Considering the content and timbre of our conversation the night before, I was quite surprised when, just as I was finishing my duties at the clinic the next afternoon, Paul appeared at my office door.
   “May I come in?”
   “Yes, I suppose so.”

   He explained that he had just finished some business in Salies and would be delighted to offer me a ride to Etcheverria, on the condition that I accept his invitation to take supper with them again.
   I measured him charily for a moment, before saying that nothing would please me more. He responded that he couldn’t understand anyone who took pleasure in the local food, save for excessively devout persons who exposed themselves to the swill as a form of mortification of the flesh in the hope of shortening their time in purgatory.
   We had no sooner settled into his surry then he said, “I’m afraid I might have drunk a bit too much last night.”
   “Oh? Do you think so?”
   “I’m not very good at making apologies… lack of practice, I suppose.”
   “I had the impression you were good at everything—kick-boxing, insulting guests, impugning the actions of your sister—all the social graces.”
   He laughed. “You’ve been saving that one up for me, haven’t you?”
   I almost smiled. In fact, I had been rehearsing what I would say to him the next time we met.
   We passed out of town and rode for a time in silence along the road to Etcheverria before he turned to me and said, “Look, Montjean. I am aware that Katya takes pleasure in your company. And it’s good for Father to have someone to listen to his interminable monologues. I love them both, and I couldn’t deny them this slight relief from the eternal boredom of this place. But I must insist on your promise that you will not engage in even the slightest intimacies with Katya—” I drew a breath to answer him, but he raised a hand, “—however innocent! However innocent. I don’t doubt your motives, Montjean. It’s just that my father… well, I’ve told you that my father must not suspect that you have the slightest interest in her. Don’t ask me for an explanation. It’s none of your affair.”
   I sighed and shook my head. “Last night you were all acid and hate; this afternoon you’re all reason and friendliness. I must tell you that I consider your mercurial disposition most childish.”
   He grinned at me. “Do you think so? Very well, I accept your diagnosis—under the condition that we drop the subject right now.”
   During the rest of the ride, Paul entertained me with imitations of local merchants and dignitaries he had dealt with in Salies, and he displayed a capacity for scathing caricature that was surprising, together with a lack of sympathy for human foible that was not surprising at all.
   “It’s a wonder you deal with merchants,” I said, “considering your contempt for them as a class.”
   “One has no choice but to come into contact with them from time to time, old boy. After all, they own the world; not through right of birth or personal gifts, to be sure. They own the world because they bought it.”
   “That may be true. But you must remember, it was your class that sold it to them.”
   He was silent for a time, then he said quietly, “That’s true. How true.”


* * *

   I was standing at the latticed arch of the summerhouse when I took from my pocket the pebble I had found and offered it to Katya.
   “Oh, thank you, sir. I was afraid you had forgotten.” She put it into a little drawstring purse along with the others and dropped it into her reticule. “Did it ever occur to you that you are giving me the world… bit by bit?”
   “I hope you don’t feel compromised by the enormous value of the gift.”
   “Oh, it isn’t the value of the gift that compromises. It’s the intent behind it. Are your intentions of a compromising nature?”
   “Very nearly.”
   She laughed. “I must warn you that my integrity is so firm that mere pebbles cannot rock it.”
   “That, my dear young lady, was a horrible, horrible pun.” I spoke with an avuncular sternness that allowed me to get away with calling her “dear.”
   She frowned and pulled a sour face. “I fear that you lack a proper appreciation for the fine art of punning. It indicates a distasteful seriousness of mind. What are words made for, if not to play with?”
   I placed my hand lightly over hers. “It is rumored that some people use them to express feelings of affection.”
   Her eyes searched mine with troubled uncertainty. “Ah well… you can’t put much faith in rumors.” Then she slipped her hand from beneath mine and turned aside to look out over the garden, her gaze distant, her attention adrift. The sunlight dappling through the lattice warmed the cupric tones of her hair and reflected from the bodice of her white dress to radiate her face in a diffuse glow. I stood close beside her. The delicate silken down on her cheek… the sweet smell of her hair… the line of her throat… the curve of her breast…
   She sighed as though returning reluctantly from some pleasant vision and turned to me. “You know, it was cruel and thoughtless of you to tell my brother and father about the spirit in this garden. Why did you do that?”
   The question took me off balance. “I… for no reason at all. Just… you know… small talk. Conversation. Surely you know I would never intentionally do anything to pain you, Katya.”
   She looked at me levelly for a moment, measuring, evaluating. Then a faint smile touched the corners of her eyes. “No, of course you wouldn’t. But just the same I do wish you hadn’t mentioned her.”
   “I didn’t know she was a secret.”
   “Not a secret, exactly. Just something of my own that I wasn’t prepared to share with anyone.”
   “But you shared her with me.”
   She considered that for a second, as though realizing it for the first time. “That’s true, I did, didn’t I?” She shrugged. “Ah well, there’s no point dwelling on it. The harm’s done.”
   “What harm?”
   “You saw how Paul reacted to the mention of the spirit, didn’t you?”
   “Yes, I did. He seemed quite shaken.”
   She nodded. “I knew he would be.”
   “But why? Surely someone so cynical as your brother doesn’t believe in spirits. Why should he be shaken by the mention of one?”
   She frowned and shook her head. “I really don’t know, Jean-Marc. But I knew instinctively that he would be.”
   I sighed and broke off a twig from an overhanging bush and began to strip the leaves from it. “Katya? Is it a real spirit?”
   “Real spirit? Isn’t that a contradiction of terms?”
   “You know perfectly well what I mean. You and Paul delight in making up tales and playing on other peoples credulity. That’s why I ask if this spirit of yours is real.”
   “Oh, she’s real enough.”
   “Have you actually seen it?”
   “Yes. Well… not quite. I’ve almost seen her out of the tail of my eye… a blur of white that vanishes when I focus on it, the way very dim stars do. But I am quite sure she’s here. I can sense her presence in a most palpable way. And it’s not the least a frightening or uncomfortable experience. She’s a gentle spirit… and so terribly sad. So terribly sad.”
   “Sad? Why sad?”
   “I don’t know. I suppose it was having it all come to an end when she was still so young.”
   “Oh? How young is she?”
   “Just fifteen and a half.”

   I smiled. “Are you sure she’s not fifteen years, five months, and eleven days old? After all, you do have this particular gift for precise measurements.”
   She looked at me with operatic seriousness. “Surely you know that it’s very difficult to judge age down to the number of days.”
   I chuckled and let the game go, tossing away my stripped twig. “You know, Katya, I understand Paul’s discomfort with the idea of ghosts… spirits. Daydreamer and incurable romantic though you accuse me of being, my grip on reality is mundanely logical. I feel lost and a little uneasy when I consider forces and events that ignore such relationships as cause and effect, deduction and reason. Do you understand what I mean?”
   “Are you saying that you don’t believe in the supernatural?”
   “I choose not to. I don’t want to. The irrational frightens me. I would feel more at ease in the presence of a brutal and cruel man than I would in the presence of an insane one.”
   She frowned. “Paul’s not insane.”
   “Oh, no, you misunderstand me. I wasn’t suggesting he is. I was only saying that I share his discomfort with the idea of the supernatural. I’m suggesting that he’s rigidly sane, like me. Inflexibly rational.”
   “And you think that’s best?”
   “Well… it’s safe.”
   She considered this for a moment. “Yes, it’s safe… but limiting.”
   We were silent for a time, as I sought a way to phrase the question that had been lurking in my mind all that day. “Katya? It is obvious that there’s something wrong. Something troubling you and your family.”
   She responded with surprising frankness. “Yes, of course there is. I would have been surprised if someone as sensitive as you had failed to feel it.”
   “Is it something I can help with? Would it be useful to talk about it?”
   “Useful? That’s an odd way to express it. But, yes, it might be… useful.” She seemed to struggle with herself, on the verge of sharing something with me, but not quite daring to.
   To make it easier for her I said, “You know that you have a sympathetic and… caring… friend in me. Surely you can sense what I feel for you, Katya.”
   She shook her head and turned away, as though to arrest my words.
   But I pursued the inertia of the moment, fearing it might not come again. “I haven’t dared to give a name to the feelings I have for you… feelings that stir in me at even the most fleeting thought of you—”
   “Please, Jean-Marc…”
   “—But if I were to give them a name, I know it would be what they call… love.”
   “Please…” She rose from the wicker chair as though to flee, but I caught her hand and drew her to me and held her in my arms.
   “Katya…”
   “No.” She sought to pull away.
   “Katya.” A slight shudder passed through her body, then she stiffened and settled her eyes calmly, but distantly, on mine. She did not struggle to escape, but her passive resistance, her immobile indifference, had the effect of chilling my ardor and making me feel quite stupid and boorish to be holding her, not exactly against her will, but against her lack of will. I wanted both to release her and to kiss her, and I didn’t know which to do.
   I was young. I kissed her.
   Her lips were soft and warm, but totally unresponsive, and when I opened my eyes after the long kiss, she was staring past me… through me.
   I dropped my arms to my sides, but she did not move, so it was I who had to step back, disconcerted, miserable.
   “I’m sorry, Katya. I’m so sorry.”
   “It’s all right.”
   “No. It is not all right. It’s just that… I love you so.”
   “It’s all right, Jean-Marc.”
   But I shook my head and turned away—
   –to find myself looking into the eyes of Paul.
   He had evidently come down the path silently and had been witness to my embarrassment.
   “Part of your bedside manner, Doctor?” His unmodulated voice was chill.
   Humiliated, angry, frustrated, I stammered, “I don’t know why I did that. It was stupid of me. I’ll leave immediately, of course.”
   “No, Jean-Paul. Don’t leave,” Katya said, a mixture of compassion and anxiety in her voice.
   “No, Katya,” Paul said. “Let the good doctor leave. It’s the noblest impulse he’s had in years.”
   “Treville,” I said, focusing my anger on him. “If it weren’t for Katya, I should be delighted to bash that insipid smile from your face!”
   “I’m sure you would at least try,” he said in an arch, bored voice.
   My jaw tight, the veins throbbing in my temples, my fist knotted, I stood before him, detesting with all my soul the calm indifference in his eyes, but at the same time recognizing it as akin to Katya’s vacant expression when I had kissed her. I drew several long breaths in an effort to rein in my passion, then I closed my eyes and let my fist relax. Turning to Katya, who was watching us with apprehension, I spoke with all the control I could bring to bear. “I regret any distress I have caused you, Katya. The simple… if undesirable… fact is that I love you. And I shall never regret that love, no matter how much I regret my unfortunate way of expressing it.” Even as I spoke, I could have killed myself for the artificial, precious wording derived from my practice of rehearsing “clever” expressions in my daydream life. I was sure I was ruining any chance I might have had to win Katya’s affection, but youthful dignity punctured is a terrible thing, capable of thrashing about in an agony of ego and harming that which it most loves.
   With a formal—and I am sure buffoonish—bow, I strode up the path, my spine stiff, my mind a chaos of anger and despair.
   As I had been brought to Etcheverria in Paul’s surry, I had to walk all the way back to Salies, my misery contrasting bitterly with the beauty of the evening, my pace and anger ebbing with each step until, by the time I reached the village square, my anger was gone, and my emotions were drained and numb.


* * *

   The last thing in the world I felt prepared to face was a conversation with Doctor Gros, but when he hailed me from his customary table under the yellow electric light of arcades I could think of no way to avoid joining him without advertising my misery and making myself a target of his jests.
   “Come, sit here, Montjean,” he commanded at full voice, slapping the seat of the chair beside him. “Take a little glass with me by way of consolation.”
   “Consolation?”
   “Well, perhaps relief, then. It depends on how your little affair with La Treville was getting on, I suppose. At all events, you have staked fair claim on the local record for brevity in romantic episodes—save, perhaps, for a little matter last summer involving our village priest.”
   “I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
   “I’ll confess some pleasure at seeing this business over. Your comings and goings had quite captured the imaginations and tongues of the town, totally eclipsing my own reputation for romantic agility, which reputation I have always cherished and promoted.”
   As he was expertly clouding my Oxygйnй with a few drops of water, I wondered how news of my contretemps at Etcheverria could have preceded me to Salies, even granting the celerity of rumor for which the village was justly renowned.
   “I haven’t the vaguest notion of what you’re talking about, Dr. Gros. But, if you don’t mind, I’d just as soon let the matter rest where it is.”
   “Mind? Why should I mind?” Doctor Gros was silent for a moment; then he muttered, “At all events, you still have a week.”
   “A week?”
   “And prodigious things can be accomplished in a week. God, it is rumored, made everyone in the world in seven days. What an extraordinary sexual feat! True, there was a notably thinner population at the time. Still, if one includes the angels, it was a prodigious feat. You know, I’ve often pondered on the sexual character of the angels, haven’t you? Boys? Girls? Hermaphrodites? Or perhaps they were constructed with no plumbing at all. In which case, their rudimentary functions become something of a miracle. Aha. Anus mirabilis! How’s that? And to think I considered my years of Latin study a waste!”
   “What’s all this about a week?”
   “Oh, come now, don’t be coy with me. The whole village knows that the Trevilles are moving away one week hence. The young man, the brother, was in town this morning making arrangements. There’s no point in your—” His eyes widened and his voice suddenly lowered. “Oh, my. You didn’t know, did you? I can see it in your face.”
   I cleared my throat. “No. In fact, I didn’t know.”
   “But, my boy, naturally I assumed… That is, you left town in the company of young Treville this afternoon, so naturally I assumed that he told you of their intention to depart from this tarnished paradise of ours. I am genuinely sorry to be the bearer of sad tidings. Can you forgive me for all that prattle about angels? (Although that bit about anus mirabilis wasn’t half bad.) Here, have another drink at my expense. Punish me economically.”
   “Thank you, no. Ah… did young Treville mention where they were going?”
   “He did not. And by failing to do so he equipped the village with an infinity of suppositions. Tunis? Martinique? Paris? Pau?—this last destination suggested, as you might suspect, by our banker, a man of uniquely narrow imagination. Is it possible that your young woman withheld this event from you?”
   “I’d rather not discuss it further, if you don’t mind.”