“As you wish. It’s up to you, of course. None of my affair.” Doctor Gros sipped his drink and looked across the square with studied indifference. Then suddenly he leaned forward. “You know, it’s possible that she didn’t tell you because she didn’t want to hurt you. It’s even possible that she didn’t know.”
   As soon as Gros suggested it, I was convinced this was the case. Katya didn’t know of Paul’s preparations to leave Salies. If she had, she would surely have told me, for of all her qualities none was more characteristic than an open honesty which could amount, at times, to painful frankness. And if she didn’t know, why was Paul keeping it from her? Could it be she would not wish to go? Was she to be taken away against her will?
   I excused myself and returned to my room where I sat on the edge of my bed pondering what to do. By the time I fell into a hot, troubled sleep, still fully dressed, I had decided to confront Paul. I would go to Etcheverria and speak to him, however unwelcome I might be. Proper form was of little matter when I was fighting for my happiness and perhaps… I dared to hope… Katya’s as well.


* * *

   The following morning, I was taking coffee at my usual table beneath the arcades, my brioches lying untouched on the plate as I was still slightly nauseated by a night of wrenching nightmares. I was surprised to look up and see Katya pushing her bicycle across the square towards me. Hatless as usual, wisps of hair dislodged by the wind of her ride, her smile cheerful and radiant, she accepted the chair I pulled out for her.
   “Isn’t it a beautiful morning!” she said. “I was awake with the first light and the dew on the meadows sparkled like… well, like diamonds, I suppose. It’s a great pity that certain clichйs are such exact descriptions that they’re difficult to avoid, unless one is willing to sacrifice clarity for originality. Would you order me a cup of coffee?”
   Petty though it must seem, I was annoyed that the events that had tortured me all night long seemed not to have touched her at all. I could not help feeling there was something insensitive in her buoyancy, so there was an edge to my voice when I asked, “Does your brother know you’ve come to town?”
   “No,” she said simply, as though it were a matter of little concern. “Aren’t you going to eat those brioches?”
   “I haven’t much appetite.”
   “I’m sorry. May I have them? I’m ravenous.”
   “By all means.”
   When the waiter had departed, leaving a fresh cup and pots of coffee and hot milk, I pursued, “I’m sure Paul would be furious if he knew you were here.”
   She took her first long sip of cafй au lait thirstily, looking into the cup as a child does. “Hmm, that’s good. Yes, I’m sure he would be. But let’s not talk about that. It’s too perfect a morning.”
   “No, Katya. I want to talk about it. I’ve passed a dreadful night, and I want to talk about what is happening to me… to us.”
   “You know, Jean-Marc, you’re not the only one who has passed a terrible night,” she said with a note of remonstration in her voice.
   I could not believe, from the freshness in her face and the clear sparkle of her eye that she had suffered through a white night.
   As it turned out, she was not speaking of herself. “When I came down this morning I found Paul asleep on the floor of the salon. He had been drinking and he looked ghastly and somehow pitiful, lying there under the hearth rug he had pulled over himself. I felt quite perfidious, leaving him in that state. But I had to be away from the house. Out into this glorious morning. And too…” She glanced away. “…I wanted to be with you, I suppose.”
   It was difficult for me to picture the cool, self-possessed Paul Treville drinking his way through a night of suffering, but the image gave me an odd sense of fellow-feeling with him, not unmixed, I must confess, with a certain satisfaction at his having shared in the pain his high-handedness had caused. But overriding this mixture of sympathy and callous satisfaction was the warming effect of that phrase, “…I wanted to be with you.”
   I placed my hand over hers, and she did not withdraw it for a full minute before confessing with a little laugh, “I really don’t know how to drink coffee with my left hand, and I’d feel a fool to spill it.”
   I lifted my hand. “Katya, let me be frank with you.”
   “That always means you intend to say something unpleasant.”
   “No, not at all. Well… perhaps. I don’t understand how you can be in such good spirits while I—and Paul, evidently—am suffering so.”
   “It’s something one learns, Jean-Marc. One must learn to empty one’s mind and seek… not joy, exactly… peace, perhaps. How else could one go on?”
   “But, for God’s sake, what in your life—in your family-brings you such pain that you have to build barricades against it?”
   She sat still for a moment, her eyes lowered as though she were thinking something out. Then she shook her head. “No. It’s not a thing I can talk about. Not even with you.”
   “But you can talk about it with me, Katya. You know that I—”
   “Hush!” Then, more softly. “Hush, please.”
   “Well, you will at least let me say that I am fond of you, won’t you?”
   “Yes,” she said, smiling at me with a wistful sadness. “I know you are. And I take pleasure in it.”
   “But you are not willing to share this—whatever it is—with me?”
   “I’ll share other things with you. When I’m happy, or when I think of a particularly good pun… I’ll share those things with you. That will have to be enough.”
   “It’s not enough at all. Good Lord, Katya, we share our happiness with anybody… with total strangers. It’s sharing the sadnesses and pain that matters. Surely you know that.”
   “Yes, I know that. It’s one of those truisms that has the misfortune of being true.”
   “Well then?”
   Her eyes searched mine for a moment. Then she smiled. “You know, Jean-Marc, your eyes are so dark they’re almost black. It must take a tremendous amount of light to fill them.”
   I turned away from her, displeased at having the subject changed in that obvious way.
   “Please don’t pout, Jean-Marc.”
   “I am not pouting.” Unfortunately, there is no way to say that without sounding petulant.
   “Listen to me, dear.” This word of affection touched me even through my frustration and despair, particularly as she used the intimate tu form for the first time. “I am sure I shall be able to patch things up with Paul. He is quick to anger, but quick to forgive.”
   “That’s because he feels nothing deeply.”
   “That is untrue. And it’s unfair. I’ll talk to Paul, and I’m sure he’ll reconsider and allow you to visit Etcheverria. Then we can take our little walks in the garden. And we can chat. And I’ll permit you to applaud my puns. And from time to time I’ll ride my bicycle into Salies and eat up all your brioches. Everything will be all right. You’ll see.”
   I shook my head, disconsolate.
   “But you must promise to join Paul and me in our little subterfuge. Father must not have the slightest hint that you and I are fond of each other. It won’t be all that difficult. As you know, Papa’s interest in the world around him is rather slight. So smile for me, won’t you? We shall have lots of things to share.”
   “But we only have a week!”
   She frowned, bewildered. “Only a week? Why? Are you going somewhere?”
   “It’s you who are going, Katya! Your family is leaving Etcheverria. Your brother was in town yesterday making the arrangements.”
   “Oh,” she said softly. Her fingers found a wisp of hair at her temple and twisted it absently. “Oh, I see.” Her voice was vacant and distant.
   “I was sure Paul hadn’t told you.”
   “What?” she asked, tugging herself from her thoughts. “Oh, no. No, he didn’t tell me.”
   We sat in silence for a time before I asked, “You don’t want to go away, do you?”
   “No, of course not. But that’s not the point. If Paul was making arrangements, then we must go.”
   “Why, in the name of God?”
   “It has happened before. When we had to leave Paris to come here.”
   “What happened in Paris?”
   She frowned and shook her head curtly.
   “What is your family running from?”

   She looked at me, then smiled faintly. “Oh, like most families, we have skeletons in our closet. I make no bones about that. Oh, come now, that wasn’t such a bad pun. If it didn’t merit a laugh, it was at least worth a smile. Or, at very least, a groan.”
   “I don’t feel like smiling.”
   “Don’t take things so seriously, Jean-Marc.” She rose. “Now I must return home. I’m sure Paul will need help with all the details of moving. But you must come take tea with us this afternoon. Please. If we have only a week together, it would be stupid of us not to use it well.”
   I sighed and nodded. “Yes, you’re right. I’d be pleased to take tea with you.”
   “Good. Until soon?”
   “Yes. Until soon.”
   She wheeled her bicycle across the square, pausing to bestow a warm smile and a nod of greeting to a brace of ladies who had obviously been gossiping about us and who were flustered at the familiarity of this hatless girl who was clearly no better than she ought to be, with her public morning assignations, the seeming openness of which did not fool them in the least.


* * *

   At tea, Monsieur Treville was in a cheerful and loquacious mood, which was the salvation of the small talk, as my thoughts were elsewhere, Paul was so icy and withdrawn that he forsook even his habitual baiting of his father’s mental obliquity, and Katya was content to sit back and smile on the three men in turn, rather maternally and distantly, it seemed to me.
   “So this is what my children do every afternoon while I toil in the service of Clio, is it? Sit about and drink tea. Prodigal. Well, I suppose it’s harmless enough. But you mustn’t let my ne’er-do-well offspring seduce you away from your studies of the plague, Dr. Marque.” He chuckled at the very idea of any devotee of medieval studies being vulnerable to such temptation.
   “Dr. Montjean, Papa,” Katya corrected.
   “Montjean? But I am quite sure you referred to him as Dr. Marque last night during supper. I remember quite clearly. Dr. Jean Marque, you said.”
   Paul sighed. “It was the night before last, Father. And the doctor was referred to by his first name, Jean-Marc. Jean-Marc Montjean. It’s a hard name to forget… try though one may.”
   Monsieur Treville frowned and shook his head in doubt. The possibility that Katya might have used my given name on such short acquaintance did not occur to him. “My children think me a muddy-minded dotterer, Doctor, because I seldom bother to pay attention to their chatter. But my memory is sound as the gold franc—not that the franc’s all that sound just now! Eh?”
   “May I ask,” Paul said, “why we are dwelling at such length on the good doctor’s name? Surely we are not that impoverished of conversation.”
   Monsieur Treville waved his hand at him. “Ah, but names can be confounding. And important too. We deal with things, not as they are, but as we apprehend them to be. Therefore, to a rather frightening degree, things are what we call them. Take my daughter here, Doctor. Baptized and presented to God under the perfectly satisfactory nomen, Hortense—my own mother’s name. Then one day I looked up from my work and there was a Katya living with me. Just like that, overnight, my Hortense disappeared and was replaced by a Katya.” He reached over and took his daughter’s hand. “But I’ve got used to this changeling who replaced my Hortense. She’s a good enough girl in her own way. Image of her mother, Doctor—well, both of them are, in fact. They had the good fortune to get their features from their mother. A woman of exceptional beauty.” Monsieur Treville’s voice softened and grew distant. “…An exceptional woman… exceptional woman…”
   Katya spoke in a bantering tone designed to tug him back from melancholy. “I wish we’d got our brains from you, Papa.”
   “What? Oh, you’re both intelligent enough. A little lazy-minded, perhaps. Victims of acedia, perhaps. But perfectly intelligent. Yes, yes, mistakes like this one of the doctor’s name are common enough, even in academics. One scholar makes a mistake—a wrong spelling, perhaps, or something even more egregious—then other scholars copy it, then the next fellow sees it three or four times in different sources, and the error takes on the weight of fact. That’s why one must do his own primary research, as I am sure you have found in your own studies of the Black Death, Doctor.” The bit in his mouth, Monsieur Treville leaned forward and spoke to me confidentially, as an academic ally. “I recall a case involving a noted scholar—member of the Academy, no less, so I’ll withhold his name to avoid scandal. He quoted the population of the village of Alos in 1250 as ‘three thousand souls.’ Three thousand! As everyone knows, Alos had no more than three hundred at the time. But there it was—print upon a page and therefore truth irrefutable! Three thousand! How many future studies will be ruined by that careless extra zero? For instance, if some scholar were to note that a hundred eighty-five residents of Alos were killed by your Great Plague, he would assume that the village had got off lightly. When in fact more than half of the population perished!”
   “You really must write an article on the evils of the stray zero, Papa,” Paul said.
   “Oh, I have. Not precisely by that title; but I have. And it was well received, if I do say so myself.”
   I smiled. “It is difficult for me, sir, to imagine anyone devoting study to Alos.”
   “Do you know the village?”
   “I know it well. It is one of the three villages that constitute the commune in which I was born.”
   “How fascinating,” Paul said without energy.
   “Indeed it is,” Monsieur Treville said. “Alos is one of the few places where the pageant of Robert le Diable is still performed.”
   “That’s correct, sir. It’s performed each year during the fкte. Just about this time of year, come to think of it.”
   “No, really?” Paul said. “Just about this time of year? The famous fкte d’Alos? My, my, my.”
   “I’d give a great deal to witness it,” Monsieur Treville said. “Last vestige of that particularly Basque integration of pagan rite with Christian intrusions. I’ve often thought that—hello! What in the world is this?” He indicated an object on the tea tray that had just caught his eye.
   “Oh, that’s mine,” Katya said. “A gift from Doctor Montjean. I must have set it on the tray absent-mindedly.”
   “But… it looks like an ordinary pebble!”
   Katya glanced at me. “Well, one might say that, Papa. But it could also be thought of as a bit of the universe.”
   As Monsieur Treville examined the poor pebble closely, I studiously avoided Paul’s eyes, where I knew I would find sarcastic amusement.
   “Yes, I suppose it could be thought of that way,” Monsieur Treville mused, returning the pebble to Katya, who slipped it into her reticule unobtrusively. “I had no idea you were also interested in geology, Doctor. Odd mixture of pursuits: geology and medieval plagues. Beware the attraction of the pure sciences. They are pure only in the way an ancient nun is—bloodless, without passion. No, no. Stick to the humanistic studies where, though the truth is more difficult to establish and the proofs are more fragile, yet there is the breath of living man in them.”
   “Dr. Marque,” Paul said. “Oh, excuse me. I meant to say, Dr. Montjean. Damn that stray zero! Doctor, don’t you think it’s time you checked my bandages, or whatever it is you do to earn your fee? That is what you came for, isn’t it?”
   “Ah… certainly. You will excuse us?”
   When I rose, Monsieur Treville rose too, saying that he really must get back to his work. Tea was good enough in its own way, and the conversation had been delightful and informative, but work was work. “You don’t mind being left alone, darling?” he asked Katya.
   “Not at all. I’ll just go down to my library and read a little.”
   “Library?” Monsieur Treville blinked. “What library?”
   “I call the summerhouse at the bottom of the garden my library.”
   Monsieur Treville shook his head and let his arms flap against his sides. “There you are, Doctor. A perfect example of the source of error in scholarship. Ten thousand years from now some scholar will read her diaries and make the erroneous conclusion that the ancient word for ‘summerhouse’ was ‘library.’ Then he’ll learn that scholars of our era passed most of their time in their libraries, and he’ll deduce that back in the early part of the twentieth century the climate in Europe was semitropical!” He returned to the house muttering, “Thus error breeds error, which breeds error, which breeds…”
   Katya looked after him, smiling. “Isn’t he a darling? Don’t you envy him, living as he does on the gentle rim of reality?”
   “I like him very much,” I said. “I can’t understand why the two of you think it necessary to pretend that Katya and I are nearly strangers. It isn’t as though your father were some sort of monster.”
   Katya glanced at me with a frown.
   “What is it? What’s wrong?”
   Paul rose languidly. “I do hope you never consider surgery, Doctor. There’s something lethal in the mindless way you wield a scalpel. Shall we see to these bandages?”
   “I doubt your bandages need attention.”
   “Nevertheless…” With a gesture he conducted me back into the salon, and I followed him after touching Katya’s shoulder lightly in au revoir. She did not respond.


* * *

   As I explored the slightly puffy area around Paul’s clavicle with my fingertips I was surprised that he did not wince with pain. “You seem to be a good healer,” I said.
   “I’ve always been that. I’ve had ribs broken and still been able to fight within a week.”
   “Fight?”
   “Yes, fight. Did I fail to mention that I was once amateur kick-boxing champion of Paris?”
   “No, you mentioned it. And I was appropriately impressed.”
   “I excelled at the sport, not so much because of my physical attributes as because of my absolute will to win and my capacity for pressing home the attack while others were bungling about with considerations of sportsmanship and fair play.”
   “Which considerations never hampered you?”
   “Not in the least,” he said with slight emphasis.
   “I suppose I’m expected to receive that information on its parabolic level?”
   “That would be wise.”

   “I see. Well, for all your remarkable recuperative abilities, you’ll have to favor this arm for another week or so.”
   Paul slipped back into his shirt without help, managing to rebutton it with some awkwardness.
   “Of course, I didn’t ask you here merely to have the benefit of your professional negligence.”
   “I assumed as much.”
   He stood before me for a moment as though uncertain how to start; then he turned away to a small table from which he took up a handsomely engraved pistol from the barrel of which protruded a metal cleaning rod. Rather clumsily, he held the pistol in his captured right hand and worked the rod in and out slowly, as though his mind were elsewhere.
   After a full minute of heavy silence I said, “Well?”
   “You know, back in Paris target shooting was a passion of mine. I only gave it up because I had collected all the medals and awards available at my shooting club.”
   “I am delighted on your behalf that you found a useful avocation.”
   Paul set the pistol down carefully and turned to me, his eyelids heavy with contempt. Once again, I was caught off guard by the astonishing way in which his features, individually considered so like Katya’s, could produce so totally different an effect. Although his cheeks were grey his eyes sunken from his night of drinking, and his mouth was pressed thin and flat, their faces were like the same melody played on different instruments—indeed, in different keys. What in her was a lively and interested intelligence was, in him, bitter wit. What in her was dreamy distance was, in him, cold withdrawal. Yet, although his were the darker tones and hers the more pastel, it was she, not he, who seemed transposed into a minor key; it was her melody that had been taken up by the melancholy split reeds.
   He smiled wanly. “I suppose my attitude towards you is revealed by my finding reason to inform you that I am both an expert kick-boxer and an excellent shot.”
   “The implications had not escaped me.”
   “Good. Let me tell you at the outset that I am furious with you, Montjean. You have acted selfishly, and irresponsibly, and perfidiously.”
   “Perfidiously? I resent—”
   He held up his hand in an annoyed way, waving away my defense. “Yes, perfidiously. Damn it, man! Although I feared you would bring nothing but pain and trouble, I allowed you to visit here, to be with Katya, to enjoy her company. Then I left you alone for a few minutes yesterday and I returned to find you clutching at her!”
   “I would not term it ‘clutching at her.’ “
   “I don’t give a damn how you would term it! The fact is, against my better judgment I permitted you to visit the house in the hope that you would be satisfied to be in her company within our family setting—properly. And the next thing I know she’s sneaking off to Salies, and you’re having a tawdry little rendezvous at some cheap cafй.”
   “Just a moment! I can assure you that—”
   “I’m not interested in your assurances! I’m telling you that—”
   “You needn’t tell me anything, Treville! It is wrong of you—and cheap—to characterize our having a cup of coffee together as sneaking off for a tawdry little rendezvous. I won’t have it!”
   He glared at me. Then he lowered his eyes and drew a long breath. “Yes. Yes, of course. That was stupid phrasing on my part.”
   “Indeed it was.” Although I was surprised to hear Paul Treville apologize for anything, I did not intend to let it go at that. “Furthermore, for what it’s worth, I had no idea that Katya intended to come to Salies this morning. It was not a rendezvous. But in all candor I can tell you that if I had known she was coming, I would have been delighted.”
   “Very well, let’s pass that point. I am sure you’re right. Katya is an independent and willful woman, and it would be just like her to go to town to see you, even though I had specifically told her not to. But what is even more contemptible than meeting with her in secret away from her home was your meddling in our affairs, scratching around the village for information concerning my activities, then—worst of all—blurting out to Katya my intention to leave this Godforsaken bled, without the slightest concern for the effect such news might have on her! She returned quite shaken, you know.”
   “She has a right to know your intentions. Good Lord, it’s her life you’re playing with, not only your own, with all this running from place to place each time the whim takes you!”
   “I am not playing with her life. I am not playing at all. I am in deadly earnest. It’s you who are playing, Montjean. Playing the role of the daring lover—the bungling Quixote who doesn’t give a damn who is hurt, so long as his desires are gratified, so long as he can run about scaling walls and rescuing maidens—maidens who do not require and do not desire rescuing!”
   “That is still to be seen!”
   His eyebrows flashed up. “Oh? Is it really? Has she ever given you the slightest indication that she did not want to stay with her family? That she was unwilling to accept my opinion of what was best for us?”
   “Well… not in those words.” Indeed, she had seemed committed to doing whatever Paul thought best. “But I am not sure she knows her own mind in this,” I added weakly.
   “But you do? You know her mind? You know what’s best for her? Jesus, man! What gives you the right to interfere in this way?”
   “I love her,” I said simply.
   Paul did not sneer, as I thought he would. His reaction was yet more devastating. He sighed deeply, closed his eyes, and shook his head with fatigue. “You love her. You love her. God protect us from the well-intentioned!” He slumped into a chair across from me and spoke almost to himself. “Because you love her, you assume you have a right to blunder into our lives, causing hurt and harm you cannot even imagine. Because you love her, you are prepared to expose her to pain and shame. You love her! Christ, man, do you imagine I do not love her? Do you think her father doesn’t love her in his vague way?”
   “I’m sure you do.”
   “Well then?”
   “But I am not sure you are considering the effect it has on a young woman, this packing her up and running off whenever the impulse is upon you. What is it you’re running from?”
   “That’s not your affair.”
   “My feelings for Katya make it my affair.”
   His eyebrows lifted. “Your feelings—? Tell me, Montjean, how old do you think Katya is?”
   “How old?” The non sequitur question seemed to me to be totally irrelevant.
   “Yes. How old.”
   “I don’t see that it matters.”
   “There’s much you don’t see. I’ll tell you then: Katya is twenty-six.” He smiled faintly. “I’m in a particularly good position to know her age, as I am only fifteen minutes her junior. I am quite sure you took her to be much younger—nineteen or twenty. Everyone does. We inherited from our mother, if I may say it without appearing vain, both our physical beauty and a tendency to remain young-looking.”
   “All right, I confess that I thought her to be younger than twenty-six. But I still don’t see—”
   “The point is this: At twenty-six, do you suppose that Katya has not attracted the attentions of other young men than you? Can you imagine that you are the first person to be touched by her charm, her spirit, her freshness?”
   “Could it be you are jealous of these men?”
   His expression hardened. “My dear fellow, if you cannot avoid being stupid, do at least try to conceal it!” He looked away and collected his thoughts. “The point I was attempting to make is that these young men considered themselves to be in love too. They would rather have died than hurt Katya. And yet, they became the agents for great pain and suffering on her part. But of course, you assume you are unique. There is nothing more commonplace than the assumption that one is unique. But believe me when I tell you that you have already caused great pain, and you are in a position to cause even more.”
   “I assure you that—”
   “You are forever assuring me of something, Montjean! I have no interest in your assurances. I realize that your intentions are of the best. You lack the imagination required to be genuinely evil. Still, you are not going to tell me that your romantic daydreams have not included anticipations of physical delight, are you? Surely you have pictured Katya alone with you and willing, probably in some romantic setting, perhaps in your rooms?”
   “That’s an outrage!” I said, recalling with mortification just such imaginings while awaiting Katya in Salies that first rainy afternoon when she came to collect her bicycle.
   “It’s not an outrage at all. You’re a healthy young animal. And certainly you weren’t clutching at her yesterday in the garden in order to achieve a more intellectual level of conversation.”
   “It is perfectly natural for love between a man and a woman to have its physical manifestations.”
   “I am not denying that. I am only pointing out that somewhere in all your noble impulses to save Katya from the machinations of her evil brother, there is an element of desire and self-gratification that may be clouding your ability to judge what is best for her.”
   My jaw tightened and I refused to respond.
   “And—damn it, man!—the tragicomedy of all this is that you don’t know—could have no way to know—that it isn’t only a matter of your inflicting pain on Katya. You are yourself in considerable danger!”
   “Danger of what kind?”
   He drew a deep breath and turned away, and I had the impression that he had said more than he intended to.
   “Danger from you and your pistol?” I pursued.

   He shrugged. “That is a possibility, I suppose. But let us seek a more civilized means of moderating your nuisance. Are you willing to hear my proposals?”
   “By all means. But I don’t consider myself in any way bound to accept them.”
   “Pity. Well, naturally I considered forbidding you to come again to this house, and forbidding Katya to go into town to see you. But I don’t fancy the image of myself standing guard at the bottom of the lane, my pistol at the half-cock. And furthermore, it might not be effective. Katya is an independent spirit, both imaginative and resourceful. Worse yet, I shouldn’t be surprised if she imagined herself to be in love with you. Oh, do try to keep that insipid smile off your face, Montjean. After all, she fancied herself in love with those other fellows, too. So here is what I suggest. Let us return—and this time with fidelity—to our original arrangement. For the next week, you may visit us—every afternoon, if you must. For my part, I shall do my best to convince Father that your visits have to do with our newfound friendship, and you will cooperate in that deception. Most important, you will not seek to be alone with Katya. I shall have the delicacy to remain out of earshot as much as possible, so you two may exchange thoughts, memories, and cooings—even witticisms, if you’re up to it. But you must promise not to sneak off by yourselves as you did yesterday, and, above all, you must promise to keep your hands off her.”
   “I resent phrases like ‘sneak off’ and ‘keep your hands off her.’ They do not describe what happened yesterday accurately, and they are repulsive insinuations.”
   He waved my objections aside impatiently. “At all events, you know what I mean. If you agree to these conditions, then Katya will have your company—which, for reasons that escape understanding, she seems to take pleasure in—and you will have seven whole days of her charm and gentleness. I realize of course that you have dreamt of a lifetime of Katya, and I can’t really blame you. The lowly moth dreams of possessing the moon. But seven days is better than nothing. And, believe me,” he enunciated each word clearly, “nothing is your only alternative.” He sat back and pressed his thumb and forefinger into his eye sockets to relieve his fatigue.
   “Are you finished?” I asked.
   “Not quite.” He spoke without opening his eyes. “You must also undertake to assist me in keeping Father in his accustomed state of ignorance as to events around him.”
   “Are you through now?”
   “Probably not. But you have been good enough to hear me out with few interruptions. I suppose I must offer you the same consideration.”
   “First, it is unjust of you to imply that I pried into your affairs to learn that you were making arrangements to leave Etcheverria. You must know that everything immediately becomes public knowledge in a provincial village. I learned of it quite by accident from my colleague, Dr. Gros.”
   “Very well. How you found out is of little importance. My real objection is to your blurting it out to Katya with no concern about the shock it must have been to her.”
   “I had no way to know that you were withholding your plans from her. I naturally assumed that something affecting her life so intensely would not be done behind her back.”
   “Pain delayed is pain lessened.”
   “Then you admit that she does not want to go? That leaving here will be painful for her?”
   “I have never denied that. But the pain of leaving is nothing to the danger of staying.”
   “So you tell me. But you refuse to explain what this great danger is.”
   “You have no right to an explanation.”
   “I believe that my feelings for Katya give me that right.”
   “You are quite mistaken in that belief.”
   “That’s your view.”
   “My view is the only one that matters.”
   “That, too, is merely your view.”
   “Would I be correct in assuming that we have reached an impasse?”
   I hated the lazy, nasal tone of his voice and the half-closed eyes settled on me as though I were an inanimate thing. But after a short pause I continued, “You obviously sought to hurt me by mentioning other men who have loved Katya. And I’ll confess that you succeeded to a degree. I had indeed thought she was somewhat younger than I, rather than somewhat older, and if the question of other loves before me had entered my mind—and it did not—I suppose I would have assumed that I was her first love, as she is mine.”
   He looked at me with distant curiosity. “You really assume that Katya loves you? Have you any evidence for that?—beyond, of course, the heart having reasons the mind knows not of, and all that trash?”
   I chose not to respond because, in fact, I had no evidence at all that she was more than fond of me. Describing more what I wished I felt than what I did, I said, “A man who loves a woman should feel a certain… gratitude, I suppose… towards anyone who has also loved and brought pleasure to her. You and I, in different ways, both love her. We ought not to be at odds with each other. I accept the fact that you think you’re doing what’s best for her. I think you’re terribly wrong, but I don’t doubt your motives. Whatever it is that you’re running away from, I am sure it’s wrong of you to deny Katya a chance to make a life for herself. But I don’t doubt your love for her.”
   His customary expression of weary hauteur relaxed, and there was a trace of compassion in his voice when he said, “Perhaps I was cruelly vague when I spoke of the ‘men’ who had loved her. There was only one. In Paris. And I never meant to imply that she loved him in return. She was kind to him. She doubtless took pleasure in his company. But love? I rather doubt it.”
   I tried to conceal the relief and comfort I found in this suggestion that I was her first love. “And what happened to this young man in Paris?”
   Paul settled his metallic eyes on me for a moment. Then he rose from his chair. “All this is a bit oblique to the point. The question is: Do you intend to accept the conditions I have made? Or would you rather not see Katya again.”
   “Before I answer, let me… Paul, obviously there is something here, some terrible thing, that you think you must flee from. Perhaps I could help in some way, if you would share the problem with me.”
   “That is out of the question. There’s nothing you could possibly do—save perhaps make things worse.”
   “Let me try!”
   “There’s nothing you could do, I tell you! And I cannot discuss this further with you. Now… what about my conditions?”
   “What choice have I, other than to accept them?”
   “You could choose not to see Katya again. But I don’t expect you to make that nobler choice.”
   “As indeed I shall not. Very well. I accept your conditions.” I rose. “Now I shall join Katya at the bottom of the garden, if that does not fall within your definition of ‘sneaking off.’ “
   He waved me away listlessly. “Just so you remember your promise to keep your hands off her.”
   I remembered the promise; but I had no intention of keeping it. I was convinced that I must do whatever I could to save Katya from a shattered life wasted in running from place to place each time Paul was frightened by shadowy dreads.
   “You know, Montjean…” Paul’s bored drawl stopped me just as I reached the terrace door. I turned to find him slouched down in his chair, his free hand over his face and his eyes closed. “It’s true that we could never have been friends, even under the best of conditions—breeding, social worlds, tastes, all that business. But you’d be mistaken to think I dislike you. A moment ago, you said something rather good about having a certain affection for those who have loved Katya. I am not immune to such feelings myself. No, I don’t dislike you, Montjean. In fact, I find you rather…” He was silent for a moment. “Oh, never mind.” He shrugged away the rest of his explanation and reverted to his former tone. “I daresay you intend to impose your company upon us at supper?”
   “How could I decline so gracious an invitation?”
   He smiled wanly. “Ah, now that’s more like it.”


* * *

   Supper consisted of the same hardy rural menu as before, a thick potage, salad, local bread, local cheese, local wine, but the atmosphere was quite festive, as Monsieur Treville was in good spirits.
   “There you see, Paul?” Monsieur Treville said with the teasing tone he had affected throughout the meal. “Jean-Marc attacks his cheese with honest vigor. Not like you, who finds it insufficiently delicate for your refined tastes.” Partway through supper, after having addressed me alternately as Doctor Montjean and Doctor Jean Marque (and once, out of nowhere, as Doctor Jean Mont), he surrendered to his confusion and began using my given name. He seemed to be experiencing a surge of affection for his son and was expressing it, as I have seen other fathers do, in the emotionally safe way of banter, using my presence as an opportunity to trot forth each of his son’s qualities, which he compared to mine in a tone that seemed to criticize Paul, but which never failed to accent his good points. He noted that I had worked hard at my studies, making the best of my limited opportunities and gifts (some fluster and apology as he assured me that he meant to say that my opportunities were limited, not my gifts), while Paul, miserable person that he was, had idled away his time and wasted his native brilliance, wit, and uncommon celerity of intellect. I had used such leisure as I had to delve into the Black Death that had so altered the course of history as to shock Europe out of the Dark Ages, while Paul had applied himself to the futile activities of becoming the best shot in Paris, a leader of the most promising young society, a champion amateur kick-boxer, and a much-sought-after decoration to any social event. And on it went; my having done all the dull correct things, and poor Paul having squandered his endless gifts (each one detailed). But by no means were we to understand that Paul’s life was a desert of wasted opportunities. No, the clear implication was that, any day now, he would grasp the rudder of his drifting ship of fate and direct his talents to some grand and worthwhile goal.
   When the oblique praise got to be too much for him, Paul baited his father by saying that he could clearly see the future for which his gifts had equipped him: directing a gambling establishment (if not something worse) in the deepest bowels of Calcutta, while telling jokes to amuse his criminal clientele, and shooting off the occasional round at a passing native for the purpose of helping them keep their population in check.

   “There, you see?” Monsieur Treville said, shaking his head at Paul. “He pretends to make light of everything. But his day will come. His day will come. Yet he does make a telling point in this matter of checking population. There is no doubt that your Great Plague, Jean-Marc, had the effect of making peasant labor rare and valuable, and the agricultural laborer was able to use his newfound worth to raise himself out of serfdom. Great good flowing from great evil. Claude Bonnet made this point quite lucidly in his incisive study of….”
   My attention wandered to Katya, whose features the candlelight touched with a delicate glow. I could see from her vague unfocused eyes that she was adrift from the table talk, her concentration on some inward and pleasant daydream. The curve of her full upper lip fascinated me. I thought of those soft lips against my own, and… I glanced at Paul just in time to find his eyes upon me with a studied frown. He looked down at his plate, then up again to his sister, and it seemed to me he was trying to penetrate her musings. I could not avoid a certain resentment at the way Paul had deceived me during that ride to Etcheverria when he had entertained me with imitations of local merchants, while all the time he knew that he had been in town arranging for his family to move away from Salies forever.
   He glanced down again, his long lashes concealing his eyes, and I was struck yet again, and this time most uncomfortably, by how identical his face and Katya’s were, particularly in the half-light of the candles.
   “….of course, Claude Bonnet is a fine scholar and a personal friend, so I would never bring this slight lapse of scholarship to his attention. I am sure you understand why, Jean-Marc. Jean-Marc?”
   “Sir? Oh, yes. Of course.”
   “I knew you would.” Monsieur Treville pushed himself up from the table. “And now… I have a treat for you. You’ll never guess what it is.”
   “In that case it would be foolish of me to try,” Paul said.
   “No, no. It’s a treat for Jean-Marc. In my study. You two go along. We’ll join you later.”
   There was a hint of tension in Paul’s tone when he said, “Why don’t we all take coffee together, Papa.”
   “No, no, no. I’ve this surprise for your young friend.”
   “Can’t we all share it?” Katya asked, casting a troubled look in my direction.
   “It wouldn’t be of interest to you, my dear. It’s…” He beamed at me with anticipatory relish. “…It’s a first edition of de Lanne! What do you say to that, young man?”
   “Well… I don’t quite know what to say,” I confessed honestly.
   “Aha, I’ll wager you never thought you would actually set your eyes on a first edition of the excellent Abbe’s benchmark study of the Great Death. You’ve read it, of course, but to hold a first edition in your hand… ah, that’s something, eh?”
   “Yes… that’s something, indeed. Yes, indeed,” I stammered out. “A first edition! Well, well.”
   As he drew me towards his study he confessed that, as I well knew, de Lanne’s work wasn’t of much importance in modern historiography—too liberally larded with myth and folktale, of course—but still there were not half a dozen first editions of the work in existence, and….
   While I examined the calf-bound volume with more signs of interest than I felt, Monsieur Treville beamed at me, participating in what he assumed to be my excitement and delight. I leafed through, pausing now and again at a page and reading a passage with pretended concentration. I even dared the occasional “Ah, yes.”
   “In some ways,” he mused, “history was grander before it was infected by impulses towards scientific accuracy. I know this is academic heresy, but I regret the replacement of Literature by Science as Clio’s closest ally. Research has been substituted for imagination; the True has fallen victim to the Actual. Our concentration on What happened and When has cost us insights into How and, more important, Why. Now, de Lanne there was quite free from the shackles of proof, and he… and he…” His voice faded in midsentence as his eye happened to fall on a bit of scribbled marginalia that captured his attention and drew him down into his padded desk chair, where he was soon comparing notes he had made with passages in two open books, absorbed and quite unaware of my presence.
   The study, an interior room protected from the rising damp that made most of Etcheverria clammy and uncomfortable, was the coziest room in the house. Its walls were lined with bookcases, and volumes were piled on the floor together with manuscripts and journals and loose pages filled with Monsieur Treville’s spidery scrawl. Open books, clippings, and stacks of paper slumped in impertinent defiance of gravity on his cluttered desk in a kind of creative disarray that gave the impression that he could quickly locate any reference or note he wanted, provided his system of discriminate disorder were not ruined by being tidied up.
   I found myself observing him fondly over the top of my book… Katya’s father… as he pored over his reading, frowning and making little grunts of doubt or hums of agreement, nervously dragging his fingers through his nest of unkempt grey hair. After a time he looked up vaguely, reeling in some thread of thought, and he was visibly startled to see me standing there. Then a smile of recognition brightened his worn features. “Fascinating book, eh?”
   “Yes, sir. Fascinating.”
   “I love the feel of an old book in the hand, don’t you? The smell of them. Aroma of learning.” He chuckled and gestured broadly towards his desk. “I’ll never finish it, of course. Not enough time left to me. But that doesn’t matter really. The attraction doesn’t lie in the accomplishment, but in the pursuit. The work. Have you ever pondered upon the way in which Time comes to us in so many disguises? For me, time is sand sifting through my fingers. Not enough of it. Can’t seem to grasp hold of it. While for my son, time is a heavy burden of boredom around his neck, something to be got rid of, something to be got through.
   “And for Katya?”
   “Ah, Katya… she who was once Hortense. So like her mother.” His work-stained eyes crinkled in an affectionate smile. “I sometimes wonder if Katya lives in the same web of time as the rest of us do. It’s all daydreams for her… smiles and spring flowers… fleeting fascinations. I often have the impression that she’s a temporary visitor from some other world. Some distant pastel world. So like her mother.”
   “I believe I know what you mean, sir. But it’s not that she’s frivolous or shallow. Her observations are often quite incisive, and she has an excellent mind.”
   “Yes, I suppose so.” He chuckled. “Do you know, I once found her studying anatomy. Human anatomy!”
   “Yes, I know.”
   His smile of paternal benevolence dissolved into a frown. “You know? How do you know?”
   I shrugged it off. “Oh, she mentioned it in passing. Or perhaps Paul did. I don’t recall.”
   “Oh, yes, I see.” He seemed to drift into thoughts of his own for a moment; then he said, “It feels good to have things all in order again.”
   “Sir?”
   He waved towards the piles of paper slumping on his desk. “For six months after we arrived here, I couldn’t find a thing. Everything was in boxes or in the wrong place. It was primordial chaos. I don’t believe my studies could survive another such debacle. I am comfortable here now. Books are where they belong, next to the books I want them next to, arranged in an order that only I know… two books purchased on the same rainy afternoon… two ideas that happen to be stacked one behind the other in the attic of my mind… opposing views set side by side… a book I like kept at an antiseptic distance from one I dislike—not a system the Bibliothиque nationale would approve, I daresay, but one that suits me perfectly.”
   I wondered how he would face the disruption of moving yet again, when Paul deigned to inform him of his decision. “I know exactly what you mean,” I said. “In my own mind, certain medical facts are bound, illogically but forever, to certain swatches of verse for the simple reason that I learned them at the same time. And often, when I want to dredge up a bit of information I must first scan through the intervening poem.”
   “Yes, yes, that’s it!” He was pleased to find another mind in which the clutter had shape and purpose. He nodded to himself; then he squinted up at me with an evaluating, conspiratorial expression. “You, ah… you mentioned this afternoon that you were born in the commune of Alos and were familiar with their Festival of the Drowned Virgin.”
   “I used to attend every year before I went off to school. Everyone in my village did.”
   “Fascinating. Fascinating. Ah… it is a three-day fкte beginning tomorrow, I believe?”
   “Tomorrow?” I had to search my memory. “Why, yes. It does begin tomorrow, come to think of it.”
   “And Alos is not so very far from here, I believe?”
   I smiled at him. “Only twenty kilometers or so up into Haute Soule.”
   He nodded. “Yes… yes. I’d give anything to observe with my own eyes the Parade of the Virgin and the performance of Robert le Diable… to talk to old people who remember how the festival used to be celebrated. Of course… I don’t speak Basque… and they might be reticent with an outsider. Now you, on the other hand… a native of the region…?”
   “Sir, nothing could please more than to attend the fкte d’Alos with you.”
   His eyes widened with innocence. “Oh, my dear fellow, I couldn’t dream of taking you from your duties at the clinic! No, no, you mustn’t think I was hinting that—”
   “Sir, I have been seeking an excuse to go back to my natal commune after all the years away. Also, I have been seeking a way to repay some of your kindness and hospitality to me. It is very thoughtful of you to provide me with an opportunity to do both at the same time.”
   “Oh? Is that so? Well…” He smiled broadly. “…If you insist on abandoning your duties in this profligate way…”
   “I do, sir.”
   “Grand! Grand!” He rose from his desk. “Let’s join the children for coffee. They’ll be pleased to hear that we are to have an outing. An adventure!”
   I could not help wondering just how pleased Paul would be to find himself in the midst of the dancing and jostling and drinking and rowdiness that is the fabric of a Basque festival. I confess to feeling a certain unkind pleasure at the image of Paul attempting to maintain his aloof aplomb in such circumstances.
   Before following Monsieur Treville from his study, I balanced the first edition on the toppling heap on his desk.
   “No, no. Keep it. It’s yours. A gift from one scholar to another.”
   “Oh, I couldn’t sir. It’s too valuable.”
   “Nonsense. Accept it as a little token.” He placed his hand on my shoulder. “I am more pleased than I can say that you and Paul have become such friends. He is too much alone. And anyway, the Black Death is only a tangent aspect of my studies, while it is the very core of yours. The book is yours by Right of Need. I shall be angry with you if you do not accept it.”


* * *

   To this day, I have the old calf-bound volume on my desk; never read; the only physical memento of the summer of Katya.


* * *

   When we joined them in the salon, Paul and Katya were sitting together before the hearth, so involved in conversation that the untouched coffee had gone cold in their cups. From their slightly too vigorous greetings I took it that they had been talking about me, perhaps concerned lest I forget my promise to conceal from their father that Katya was the object of my interest in Etcheverria. I sought to set their minds at ease by showing them the book and describing in unnecessary detail the things Monsieur Treville and I had discussed.
   I was surprised at Paul’s reaction to the news that we were all to embark tomorrow on an outing. With the first mention of it, he measured me with a long glance, as though wondering what deviousness I was up to. But Monsieur Treville’s childlike enthusiasm soon infected Katya, who decided that the trip should be broken by a picnic, and Paul went along with the proposal, amusing us by assuming the role of the grumpy, put-upon one who detested all outings and all alfresco dining.

   The evening ended with Katya and Paul entertaining us with descriptions of pranks they had played as children—quite outrageous antics that Monsieur Treville disavowed any knowledge of. He pretended to be shocked at their disrespect for adults and relatives as he beamed at me and shook his head with that helpless admiration of the doting parent. The pranks had been based on the inability of houseguests to tell them apart when they were children and often dressed in the androgynous costumes then fashionable.
   Towards the end of the evening, it was decided that we would depart for Alos one day thence, early in the morning so we could break our trip with Katya’s picnic and still arrive in time for the afternoon and evening festivities. Twenty kilometers would make a long ride back, and we would not return to Etcheverria until the small hours of the morning, but Katya was as excited as a child at the prospect of being up late into the night and riding in an open cariole under the brilliant midnight stars of that perfect summer.
   Monsieur Treville grew sleepy and began to nod in his chair by the time I rose to leave. Paul invited me to come again tomorrow for tea after I had finished my duties at the clinic, and he was gracious enough to allow Katya and me a moment alone at the door, where we exchanged the simple words of polite parting with a softness of voice that implied more than it said. Katya placed her hand on my arm. “Thank you, Jean-Marc.”
   “For what?”
   “For arranging this outing with Papa. It will help to soften the blow of having to move again.”
   “I don’t think of this as an outing with your father. I think of it as an outing with you. And for that, it’s I who give thanks.”
   She lowered her eyes and pressed my arm.


* * *

   As I walked back to Salies under a Prussian-blue sky of velvet alive with gemstars, a pervious heaven, I pondered the contrasts of the evening at Etcheverria: the gay chatter at dinner, over against Paul’s dark warnings; the facile joy Katya took in little things, in puns and pebbles, against her sudden retreats into melancholy reverie; the fumbling kindness of Monsieur Treville, against the fear his children had that he might learn of my affection for Katya. It was a canvas painted half in watery pastels, half in lurid impasto. And I had the disturbing conviction that it was the pastels that were artificial, a thin wash to cover more foreboding textures.
   Upon reaching my rooms, I found a note from Doctor Gros under my door telling me that he had tried to contact me and that I must visit him at once in his flat attached to the clinic. When I arrived he was obviously annoyed at having sought me without success, but his annoyance was nothing to mine when I discovered he intended to leave the village for two days, and I would have to remain in Salies on call for emergencies until his return.
   “But I have made plans that will be awkward to change,” I complained. “Is this trip of yours absolutely vital?”
   “It is more than absolutely vital; it’s a matter of pleasure-seeking,” he said, offering me a brandy which I waved away. “One of my dear lady patients has requested that I accompany her to St. Jean de Luz. She’s a widow who takes the cures at various watering places for the purpose of mitigating the discomforts of her celibate state. Under normal conditions, nothing would please me more than to leave you free to pursue your pleasures, unencumbered by duty, but unfortunately some years ago I took a solemn vow abjuring all impulses to waste such sexual opportunities as come my way. Think of me as a victim of Honor, unable to break an oath. And think of yourself as a victim of circumstance. You’re sure you won’t have a little glass?”
   “Couldn’t I attend to the clinic during the day and be free in the evenings at least?”
   “I’m afraid not, Montjean. Oh, if it were only our lady patients with their hot flashes and cold hearts, I wouldn’t care one way or the other. But, with me away, you will be the only doctor in the parish, and we do have our share of genuine problems—our births, our broken bones, our distressed livers, the occasional miraculous pregnancy of an unmarried milkmaid. It all has to do with that oath of yours. Surely you remember it… so recently taken. Did I forget to offer you some brandy?”
   “I don’t want any,” I said bitterly.
   “Oh, cheer up, man! What’s two days to you, a youth whose primary asset in life is Time? If you look at it just right, I am more to be pitied than you. I shall be embarking only on a tawdry little affair; while you, if I do not misread the symptoms, are in the throes of love. Believe me, young man, you have no grounds for envy. You will be left with fertile memories; I shall be left with only a strong urge to bathe.”
   “Yes, but—”
   “Perhaps I should put it this way: I intend to leave tomorrow morning, and there’s no point in our debating the matter.”
   Lacking alternative, and with a minimal display of good graces, I agreed to attend to the clinic and to remain in the village until his return. But I extracted his promise to pass by Etcheverria on his way and explain why I would not be able to take tea with them that day, or attend the fкte d’Alos the next.
   “A commission I shall undertake with pleasure. But a sense of fair play requires me to warn you that, once your young woman casts her eyes on my virile features, untrammelled by beauty or even conventional regularity, I cannot be held accountable for her heart. You’re sure you won’t have a little glass?”


* * *

   The following day I was harnessed to the routine of the clinic, including a visit to the watering station in Doctor Gros’s stead. His tourist/patients were not delighted to find the crusty old doctor with whom they could share their giggling little double entendres replaced by a young man who appeared crisp and unsympathetic to their imagined maladies.
   Late that afternoon the featureless routine was broken by the dramatic arrival of a Basque peasant lad who had caught his sleeve in a farm machine. I was able to staunch the bleeding and save the arm, and I received the tearful gratitude of the panicked mother and even a reluctant handshake from the taciturn father, who, having watched the operation in grim and desperate silence until he was sure the boy was out of danger, then manifest his love and relief by being furious with the lad for risking so precious a life. Because the mother had no French, I had spoken to them in Basque, and I could sense their discomfort at the realization that this doctor was one of them. Like most proud and oppressed minorities, the Basque have developed a defensive armour of racial superiority requiring them to assert that the Basques are better farmers, dancers, lovemakers, fighters, and predictors of weather than the French or Spanish majorities amongst whom they live. But, at the same time, when it comes to important matters like lawsuits or illness, they cannot avoid a deep feeling that it would be wiser to have their affairs and lives in the hands of a cultured outlander. The most brutalizing effect of prejudice is that the victims come to believe, at a deep and unconfessed level, the stereotypes established by the oppressor. For this reason, the father of the injured boy was all the more relieved when it became clear that his son’s life was to be spared and his usefulness around the farm undiminished. He went so far as to offer me a glass of Izarra, although his peasant wariness made him ask how much I intended to steal from him for this slight medical attention.

   As I was washing up after they left, I reflected on how Doctor Gros’s insistence that I remain in Salies had been vindicated, for the lad had been rushed into the clinic a little after four o’clock, when I might have been taking a cup of tea on the terrace of Etcheverria. It also occurred to me that, for the first time since I looked up from under my straw boater and saw Katya approaching across the park green, I had passed an hour without the image of her on my inner eye. It was my first experience of the emotional anodyne to be found in working at a calling, rather than a profession—that daily narcotic that was to numb the slow passage of the years following the summer of Katya.
   After the clinic closed for the night, the hours dragged by ponderously while, before I had met Katya, I had easily filled my time with scribbling verses, reading novels, and daydreaming about the excitements and challenges of my future. To relieve the monotony, I left my boardinghouse and crossed the square to one of the cafйs. But the conversation at the tables and up and down the zinc bar centered on the impending war with Germany: warnings from Paris; threats from Berlin; saber-rattling from beleaguered, confused Austria; scabbard-rattling from vast, hollow Russia. Some of the older men remembered the wounded gloire of the 1870 War, and spoke of humiliating Germany, of recovering Alsace, of “France to the Rhine!” I found this martial frenzy and drunken jingoism disgusting… and frightening. So I returned to the solitude of my room.
   I have before me the notes I scribbled in my journal that night, and the parenthetical comments on those notes added several years later, after the war was over and I was established as the village doctor of Alos. I share them with you uncorrected, revealing the youthful pedantry of Greek-letter rubrics and my romantic pseudo-philosophic assumptions, and also sharing with you the bitter postwar disenchantment of the parenthetical notes.
   Alpha: This horrid war will never materialize! (It did.)
   Beta: If war does come, it will be brief because human flesh and emotions cannot withstand modern machines of death and mutilation. (It was not brief. The flesh did withstand the death and mutilation. The emotions did not.)
   Gamma: If I am called to the colors, I shall flee to Switzerland in protest against this madness. (I did not. I no longer cared.)
   Delta: Even in the brutality of war, a man of poetry, a man of inner resources, should be able to fight without becoming an animal, to rise above the slaughter and maintain his spiritual dignity. (Bullshit.)


* * *

   After an uneventful morning, I was taking the plat du jour luncheon at my usual cafй under the arcade, insensitive to the sparkling beauty of the weather, my thoughts concentrated on Katya and Etcheverria.
   “Are you receiving guests?”
   “What?” I was startled out of my reverie. “I beg your– Katya? What a surprise. Oh… and Paul.”
   “I take it you recommend this restaurant?” Paul asked, looking around with distaste.
   I rose and gestured them to join me, which Katya did with a warm smile. But Paul remained standing. “I have a few errands to attend to. But when I return I should be delighted to accept… oh, anything that can’t be ruined by the chef. A glass of water, perhaps? We’ve been trudging along that dusty road for hours… perhaps for weeks. I no longer recall. The torture of it has blurred my memory.”
   “Yes,” Katya said, “I convinced Paul to walk with me. It’s a gorgeous day, and the fresh air and exercise are good for him.”
   “I wonder why everything that is good for one is either dull or painful? Why is everything that is repulsive to the flesh assumed to be good for the character?”
   “Oh, rubbish! It was good for you. For my part, I am ravenous. That looks good, Jean-Marc. Will you order some for me?”
   “With pleasure.” I signaled the waiter.
   “I should warn you,” Paul said, “that she has the gastronomic indiscretion of a Pygmy. I wonder we have any furniture left in the house.”
   “Oh, really, Paul!”
   “Don’t ‘oh, really’ me. I’ve seen you glance covetously at the ottoman when you’re feeling peckish. Don’t try to deny it. Do you know what she did on the way here, Jean-Marc? With total disregard of my social embarrassment, she pushed her way through a hedge and snatched an apple from a tree—a vulgar apple from a living tree! And she ate it. Fell upon the wretched vegetable and manducated it. Chomp, grind, munch, gnash… and all that was left was a disgusting core.”
   “Perhaps,” I said, “she has an appetite for life that ought not to be denied expression.” A slight movement of his eyebrows told me that he had read my meaning.
   “It was delicious, actually,” Katya said. “A little green and tart, but delicious.”
   “Then what did she do?” Paul asked, all mock outrage. “In emulation of perfidious Eve, she offered to fetch one for me. For me! Can you picture Paul Etienne Jean-Marie de Treville trudging along the road, pushing pome fruits into his mouth? Then for the next two or three hundred kilometers she babbled on about the glories of nature, cooing over garish weeds that choked the roadside—”
   “Wildflowers,” Katya clarified.
   “—and pretending that the damned things had names (both Latin and vulgar) and that there was some unstipulated virtue in my learning them. As though I intended ever again to submit my body to the tortures of an overland trek! Now, I will concede that some of the names had a kind of ironic rightness… goatsbreath, frogsbane, stenchpoppy—”
   “He’s making those up.”
   “—but others were as stickily saccharine as her gushing enthusiasm. Sweetheart’s joy, love’s sigh, passion’s heart, lust’s elbow—”
   “Didn’t you promise us that you had to run off to perform errands?” Katya asked.
   “And indeed I have. I must haggle with the local merchants about the storage and shipment of our impedimenta. You two will have to suffer along without my company for a quarter of an hour. But I warn you, Montjean. Feed her quickly, or be prepared to stand guard over treasured family knickknacks, porcelain vases, umbrella racks, that sort of thing. Anyone who would eat an apple in its raw state, with the stench of tree all over it, would eat anything.” And with a wave of his hand he departed down the arcade.
   Katya smiled after him.
   “Your brother seems chipper enough,” I said, after the waiter had brought her plat du jour and departed.
   “Hm-m. We had a delightful walk. He knows how it makes me laugh when he plays at being shocked and horrified by everything pertaining to nature.”
   “Katya, I am so sorry that things came up to interfere with our plans. I know I’ve ruined your father’s hopes to attend the fкte d’Alos. You did get my message, I hope?”
   “Yes, we did. And your Dr. Gros… what a charming man.”
   “You found him charming?”
   “Hm-m. Don’t you?”
   “If I were asked to list a thousand words describing him, ‘charming’ would appear nowhere.”
   “Why is that?”
   “Because his philandering has cost me two days with you. Two precious days, when we have so few that—”
   “—Don’t let’s talk about the time we shall not have together. It’s pointless and saddening. Let’s talk about the time we shall have. Our trip to the fкte d’Alos is not ruined. We’ve simply decided to delay it until tomorrow. And I’ve heard that the last day of a fкte is the most exciting anyway.”
   “Well… it’s the least inhibited. It’s quite common for birth dates in Basque villages to fall nine months after the last day of the fкte, with hasty marriages sandwiched in between.”
   “Speaking of sandwiches, I’ve planned out the picnic we’ll have on our way. We’ll eat out in the fields—perhaps in an orchard.”
   “I’m sure Paul is bursting with anticipation.”
   “Oh, he’ll grouse and complain to amuse us, but I don’t care how he feels about it. We must take advantage of this magnificent weather. As soon as the idea occurred to me, I had to come into Salies to tell you. When I asked Paul if I might, he was hesitant, but then he offered to accompany me. I know you don’t like him, but he’s always been very kind to me. And, do you know what? I really think he likes you… in his own reluctant way. Does that surprise you?”
   “It does indeed. He’s uniquely skillful at concealing his affection.”
   “Oh, Paul’s like that.” She smiled at me, and my heart expanded in my chest.
   “I thought about you constantly all through yesterday, Katya.”
   “Constantly? Your attention wasn’t on your work for even a single second?”
   “Well, almost constantly, then.”
   “Relatively constantly?”
   “Almost relatively constantly, at least.”
   “I’m pleased. I thought about you, too. Not quite constantly, or even relatively constantly, but often… and with pleasure. I sat for hours down in my library at the bottom of the garden, reading a book… well, not exactly reading it. More reading at it. Staring through the words and letting my mind wander. The garden was so lovely… tangled, overgrown… the warmth of the sun on my face… the somnolent hum of insects. It was so peaceful.”
   “And your little ghost? Was she peaceful too?”
   She set her fork down and looked at me. “How on earth did you know that?”
   “Know what?”
   “That the young girl was… not happy, exactly… peaceful. Several times I felt her presence. Like a melody sung just out of hearing. But there wasn’t the sweet sadness that I used to feel flowing from her. There was a kind of… of muted joy. But how could you have known about that?”
   “I didn’t really.”
   “What are you trying to convince us you didn’t do?” Paul asked, appearing from behind the arcades and joining us at the table. “Don’t believe him, Katya. I am sure he did it. It’s just like him to do that sort of thing—whatever it was. Tell me, do you think the waiter might be prompted to give me a glass of the fluid that passes locally for wine?”
   I beckoned the waiter and gestured for the wine. “Would you like some coffee, Katya?”
   “Yes, please. No, on second thought, I must go around to the shops. There are a few things I want to get for tomorrow’s picnic.” She rose. “No, don’t get up. Thank you for the luncheon, Jean-Marc. That coat rack was particularly delicious.”
   Paul and I smiled her away; then I turned to him. “Katya tells me she finally gave in to your begging and arranged a picnic for tomorrow.”
   “I can hardly wait. Crouching uncomfortably on the ground, nibbling at dry sandwiches, dust blowing into the food, to say nothing of the small creatures that will attend as uninvited guests. In my view, eating out of doors is like fornicating on a busy boulevard. The basic biological impulses should be satisfied in private—or at least in company of a few understanding friends.”
   The waiter brought his wine. “Ah,” he said, draining the glass then shuddering with a grimace. “It’s sometimes difficult to recall that, with the benefit of a few incantations, this swill can become the blood of Christ.”
   “Katya tells me we shall all be going to the fкte d’Alos after all.”
   “Katya tells you everything, it would seem. Yes, we shall be going. Father is looking forward to it with the anticipation of a child.”
   I was silent for a moment. “Paul,” I began—
   “—There’s something in your tone that suggests you’re preparing to give me advice… the only thing genuinely more blessed to give than receive.”
   “Not advice, exactly. I was thinking about your father.”
   “And?”
   “The other evening, in his study, he mentioned that he didn’t think he could stand another move… all his books and papers in chaos… nothing where he could find it.”
   “It’s good of you to concern yourself so with my affairs. But you will forgive me if I find something self-serving in your desire to see my family remain here, won’t you?”
   “I presume you haven’t told your father about your plans yet.”
   “As it happens, you’re mistaken—a condition I suppose you’ve become used to after all your years of blundering about in other people’s affairs. In fact, I told Father about the move last night.”
   “And how did he take it?”
   “Not well, of course. However, he understood the necessity and trusted my judgment. But then, he is equipped with some knowledge of our circumstances and does not, like you, make evaluations from the basis of abysmal ignorance. I do hope that doesn’t sound harsh or critical. Listen here, Montjean. Let’s you and I make a pact. Let’s do what we can to make tomorrow a fine and amusing day for Katya and Papa. I shall do my part. I shall participate in the press and sweat of a rural festival, a smile of delight frozen to my face. I shall force cold food into my mouth while sitting on dirt. Greater love hath no man for his sister. Ah… and here comes the woman in question bearing in her basket, I fear, all kinds of nasty comestibles for alfresco gorging… lots of juicy things designed to drip onto clothing.” He rose. “May we expect you sometime midmorning?”
   He joined Katya in the middle of the square, and they left towards Etcheverria, after she waved to me and mouthed, “Until tomorrow.”
   I sat for a time, looking across the square dazzling with sunlight. I could not quite articulate the ambivalence of my feelings, because to do so required confessing to a petty resentment of Katya’s ability to face our forthcoming separation with so much more equanimity than I. To be sure, there was an element of courage in her attitude, of dealing gracefully with the inevitable. But where does strength leave off and callousness begin? What is the boundary between courage and indifference? And what of my own behavior? Had I not chatted urbanely with Paul, joking about picnics, when Katya’s happiness was at stake? Are we not all victims of social training, of “good form,” which requires us to face the greatest calamity with a certain grace and style? We would rather be destroyed than embarrassed.
   And I thought of the forthcoming war that had been the talk of the cafй the past night. Would the young men called to arms laugh and joke and exchange hearty platitudes in imitation of popular fiction, while they waited to be mutilated by the stupidity and arrogance of aged politicians? Could the youth of France be so gullible?
   Eight months later, in the trenches of the Marne, I would have the answers. Yes. Yes, young men would indeed joke and exchange stiff platitudes on the last nights of their lives. Good form… being a man… playing the game.


* * *

   Upon his return that evening, I sought out Doctor Gros to tell him I would want the morrow free for a little trip.
   “Hm-m. Yes, of course,” he said, his mood uncharacteristically pensive and umber.
   “Your adventure didn’t live up to expectations?” I asked.

   “No, of course not, my boy. Yet, even in my case, where the whole business has become so… clinical, there is the irritating presence of Hope. No matter how much one ballasts his adventures with heavy cynicism, there is always that damned glimmer of expectation that must be doused out by reality, again, and again, and again.”
   “You don’t sound all that refreshed by your escapade.”
   “Oh, it was a good enough bout of its kind. Vigorous. Reasonably inventive. I don’t expect these affairs to refresh me, exactly. More of an emotional purgative. An assurance that, in missing everything the romantic poets coo over, I have missed nothing of value. So! You’re going to join the Trevilles in a little dйjeuner sur l’herbe, eh? Then off to participate in the revels of a rural fкte. Do you think that is wise?”
   “Wise?” I laughed. “That’s a strange thing to say. What’s troubling you?”
   He scrubbed his meaty face with his palm and sighed deeply. “Sit down and let me play the avuncular sage for a few minutes.”
   “Sir, if you intend to say anything that—”
   “Sit down.” There was a firmness in his voice that impelled me to obey. As he fumbled about in his desk drawer for one of the black Russian cigarettes he occasionally smoked, I had the feeling he was playing for time to consider how to present something awkward to me. “Ah, here we are. Oh, my, these cigarettes are as dried out as an old nun’s hym—heart.” He tossed the box back into the drawer. “All right, let me say this as simply as possible, because I cannot think of a delicate way to approach the matter. Yesterday evening I attended a little party with my companion—very gay affair, very hollow, much laughter but little mirth—and in the course of trivial chat with a man vacationing from Paris I mentioned that my practice was in Salies. The fellow’s face lit up with that special ecstasy of the gossip with a choice morsel to share, and he asked if Salies were not the village the Trevilles had moved to—’fled to’ was his actual expression. I had no interest in his scandalmongering, but it occurred to me that, in my role as your mentor and colleague—don’t bother to give voice to the sarcasm in your face. At all events, I heard him out. Ugly little affair. To say it bluntly out, it appears that your young lady’s father shot and killed a young man in Paris—a promising lad of excellent family who—”
   “—What?” I rose. “I don’t believe… What are you saying?”
   “Now, now. It was all a wretched accident, of course. After a long inquiry, upon the details of which the smut-hunting journalists battened, Treville was cleared of any intention of wrongdoing. It appears that the young victim had been an occasional visitor to the home. It was common gossip that the lad was paying court to the young Treville girl. Presumably the boy had—or thought he had—an arrangement to meet the young lady rather late one night. He was creeping about the grounds, possibly seeking informal entry into the house—” Doctor Gros raised a hand. “Don’t bother to object. I am making no judgments concerning Mlle Treville’s character. I am simply recounting the tale as told to me. Well… the rest is simple enough. Monsieur Treville, believing the young man to be a prowler or burglar, shot him dead. The judicial investigators found no reason to doubt his version of the event, but of course parlor gossip fabricated its own narrative. Outraged father… in flagrante delicto… that sort of thing. The more generously disposed of their friends suggested that an elopement had been intercepted. The fellow telling me the story dismissed this possibility with a yellow leer. Well, that’s about it. As soon as the legal stew subsided, the Trevilles left, fleeing as far from Paris as they could. And one can’t get much farther from Paris than Salies, either geographically or culturally. I hope you understand that I am telling you all this only because I believe you ought to know.”
   In my distress I had drifted to the window of his study, where I stared out into the dark garden. So overcome was I by what I heard, so great was the struggle to comprehend and accept it, that it was several moments before I could mutter, “Yes, yes. I understand that.”
   “And you’re not offended by my interference?”
   I shook my head. “No… no. Why do you doubt Monsieur Treville’s version of what happened?”
   “What makes you assume I do?”
   “You began all this by asking if I thought it wise to join the Trevilles in their trip to Alos.”
   Doctor Gros was silent for a moment. “Yes. So I did,” he said heavily, letting it go at that.
   I turned away. “God! How terrible that must have been for them! The journalists… the whispering. No wonder they choose to live off by themselves, secluded from society. Think of how the rumors and gossip must have lacerated them! Poor Katya! This explains so much of their distant, retiring behavior.”
   “Perhaps… perhaps. But it doesn’t quite explain… everything. For instance, it doesn’t explain why they have suddenly decided to flee from Salies. None of our young men have been reported missing, to my knowledge. And even you, although your wits have been battered by love, appear to be in reasonably good health.”
   “It’s not a thing to joke about!”
   “No, of course not. Terrible taste. Do forgive me.”
   “It’s possible that they are fleeing from what happened in Paris. If you learned about it by accident in St. Jean, it’s not beyond imagination that ugly rumors have pursued them even here.”
   “Yes, that’s possible. And I pity anyone scarred by the acid of provincial gossip. Gossip gives our women an opportunity to dabble in delicious sin without having to repent, sin they will never experience at first hand, protected from temptation as they are by lack of courage, lack of imagination, and lack of opportunity—which deficiencies they view as proofs of their moral rectitude.” He was silent for a moment; then he spoke haltingly. “Is this… how to put this delicately?… is this your first love, Montjean?”
   I did not respond.
   “Allow me to assume from your silence that it is. You’re having rather a nasty go of it, and I am sorry. One’s first love is supposed to be all tinted mist and perfume… save for the final recriminations, of course. You’ve had bad luck, son. The tawdriness is not supposed to emerge until one’s later loves.”
   I could not conceive of “later loves.” I was sure that my capacity to love was as narrow as it was deep, and that Katya was my love, not one of my loves. As time was to demonstrate, such was the case.
   “Well then!” Doctor Gros said, boldly changing the timbre, uncomfortable in this unaccustomed role of the compassionate man. “I suppose I should congratulate you on saving the Hastoy boy’s arm yesterday. I’ve already heard about your noble feat from several sources. However—lest you grow vain—let me assure you that the reason everyone is impressed is that they doubted you were capable.”
   “I see.” I forced a watery smile. “You don’t mind if I take tomorrow off and spend it with the Trevilles, do you?”
   “My dear boy,” Doctor Gros said, his voice trembling with sincerity as he patted me on the shoulder, “my dear boy. I want you always to view yourself as uniquely dispensable.”


* * *

   Like so many others, I was spoiled by the magnificent weather of that summer, coming to accept day after day of perfect beauty as the right and normal way of things, forgetting that, as Monsieur Treville had said, cold and darkness are the constants in the vast stretches of the universe, light and warmth existing only in the vicinity of minute star-specks. In a similar way, loneliness and resignation are constants in the life of a man, youth and love being passing moments whose very preciousness lies in their mutability. There would be nothing wrong with clinging to the comfortable fiction that these pleasant ephemera were the eternal conditions of life, were it not that, when they pass, as inevitably they must, we are left to spend the bulk of our days in bitterness, feeling somehow cheated by fate. We end with being plagued by the tortures of envy and hope which deny us the modest, but enduring, pleasures of calm and resignation.
   These are, of course, the reflections of age, and they come only after one has accepted his personal mortality. But I was young that summer, and immortal, and there were no leavening traces of calm and resignation in my mood as I walked the two and a half kilometers to Etcheverria. The sunlight poured down upon the countryside like a golden liquid through air refreshed by breezes bearing the scent of grass and flowers. Overhead, puffy fair-weather clouds churned sedately along on their way to the mountains, and birds cried out their joy in the hedgerows. I was filled with a sense of my youth and strength, and with a desire to embrace life—to struggle with it if need be—to fashion fate in the image of my desires.
   Oh, I had passed a hard enough night before falling into a fragile sleep, feeling an irrational and ignoble jealousy towards that poor young man who was killed in Paris. I could not picture the bungling, absent-minded scholar that was Monsieur Treville actually leveling a pistol and shooting someone. It was unthinkable… horrible.
   But by the time I had risen, shaved particularly closely, and begun the pleasant early-morning walk to Etcheverria, I found that I was experiencing more relief and hope than I had in days. The ominous shadow surrounding the Trevilles was no longer a mystery; it was a palpable thing that could be confronted and fought. I was determined to speak with Paul at the first opportunity, seek to convince him that running away from gossip and insinuations would not, in the long run, solve anything. Eventually the rumors would find them again; ultimately they would have to make a stand and face their tormentors; time purchased with fruitless efforts to escape was not worth the cost in peace, stability, and comfort.
   When I arrived at Etcheverria, my persuasive arguments were rehearsed and marshaled, but I found myself instantly swept up in the preparations for the picnic and fкte. In the same breath as her greeting, Katya asked me if I would mind carrying a basket out to the stable where Paul was harnessing up the trap… then I might come back and help her select the wine… oh, and go over the list with her to see if anything had been forgotten… maybe, on second thought, I should help Paul, who wasn’t the most competent hand in the world with horses… there would be dancing at the fкte, wouldn’t there?… oh, of course there would be dancing… things might seem in a bit of turmoil, but really everything was in readiness, save for last-minute matters, of course… Father was most excited at the prospect of observing the fкte at first hand and chatting with the old-timers… would these shoes do for dancing?… oh, how would you know… come to think of it, where is Father?…
   During the cataract of greeting words, she accepted the pebble I had found along the road and dropped it into her reticule, then she absent-mindedly brushed my cheek with a kiss of thanks.
   It was the comfortable offhandedness of the kiss that pleased me most.
   I found Paul in the stable, grumbling and swearing as he struggled awkwardly to harness the trap while favoring his hurt shoulder and attempting to avoid any contact between the animal and his white linen suit. I laughed and offered to take over the job.
   “Be my guest, old fellow. I have no false pride about my ability to perform the tasks of a stableboy. After all, one wouldn’t ask a stableboy to entertain three ancient gentlewomen at a garden party while exchanging wit with half a dozen dense old patricians and, at the same time, keeping a gaggle of adolescent girls giggling and blushing with the odd wink or shrug. That’s the kind of thing I was trained to accomplish. To each his metier. I’ll help Katya with the wine. More down my alley.” He gave the horse one last look of disgust. “Do you know why I dislike horses?”
   “No. Why?”
   “It’s their antisocial impulse to defecate constantly. Horsey sorts will babble on about the noble beasts until your eyelids are leaden, but they never seem to mention this little flaw in their character. Someday I shall own a motorcar.” He started to leave, but stopped at the stable door. “But then, with my luck, the damned motorcar will probably be forever dropping iron filings out of its back end.”
   “Do go help Katya with the wine.”
   By the time I brought the trap around to the front of the house, everything was in readiness. But Monsieur Treville was nowhere to be found. After calling up and down stairs for him and out in the garden, Katya discovered him in his study, sitting at his desk scribbling notes, still wearing the broad-brimmed panama he had chosen for the outing. He explained to us that he had just stepped into his study to fetch something—he couldn’t recall just what—and his eye had fallen on a little phrase in one of the open books on his desk, so naturally he read it over; then a corresponding reference occurred to him that demanded checking for accuracy; and the next thing he knew an hour had passed, and everyone in the South of France was running about bellowing his name. Most disconcerting.
   The old gentleman insisted on taking the reins, as he doubted that he would be able to share his duties in the return trip later that night. Katya sat beside him, and Paul and I in back. As we went along the dirt road towards Alos, I looked for signs of dismay in Monsieur Treville at the thought that he would have to uproot his library once again, but as best I could tell, he was in good spirits. His longish silences had more the texture of musing than of brooding. Perhaps he had put it out of his mind for the moment. Or perhaps he had simply forgotten about it.
   As though to demonstrate his unique capacity for forgetfulness, he twice allowed the horse to slow almost to a stop; then he looked around with a puzzled frown before, recalling with a start that it was he who was driving, he snapped the reins to get the animal going again.
   As we progressed farther up towards the mountains, Katya lifted her face to the sun and breathed deeply and slowly, her eyes half-closed. Paul, on the other hand, seemed to sit tensely on the seat beside me, as though unwilling to relax, as he looked out on the countryside with distaste and mistrust at all this raw nature that was being inflicted on him.
   “May I inquire as to our destination?” he asked.
   “Alos?” I responded. “Oh, it’s just a little agricultural village. Quite humble. Typically Basque.”
   “I hadn’t noticed that humility was typical of the Basque,” he said, letting his eyes settle lazily on me. “Not that they lack every justification for being humble. And how far away is this humble little Basque agricultural village?”
   “Nine or ten kilometers as the crow flies.”
   “And how far, if the crow has chosen to ride in the back seat of a cart lurching over an uneven dirt road?”
   “Oh, about twice that, I should estimate.”
   “I see. Twenty kilometers of unrelieved natural beauty attacking us from all sides. How wonderful.”
   Katya laughed and turned to us. “Don’t despair, Paul. We’ll break our journey with a lovely picnic.”
   “Oh, Good Lord, yes, the picnic! How could I have forgotten the picnic? Is there no end to these pastoral delights? I shall have to protect myself from this glut of pleasure, lest my senses be irremediably cloyed. And have you chosen a suitable site for our jolly picnic?”
   “Of course not! It’s an adventure, Paul. One cannot organize an adventure any more than one can rehearse spontaneity. We shall simply go along until we find the perfect spot, and there we shall stop.”
   “I see. And how shall we recognize this perfect spot?”
   “It will be where we stop.”
   Paul turned to me and blinked several times in accurate imitation of his father’s expression when bewildered.
   I shrugged. “It makes perfect sense to me.”
   “Hm-m. I sense a conspiracy. Very well, sister dear, I accept your notion of an adventure. But I do hope your perfect spot comes along soon. The sooner this feast begins, the sooner it will be done. And it’s always been my philosophy that anything worth doing is worth doing quickly and shoddily. A man must have some rules to live by.”
   I laughed. “Oh come now, Paul. Sit back and let all this nature and beauty seep into your soul. Become one with the universe.”
   Paul shuddered at the very thought. “It was God’s design to keep Man and Nature apart. It is for this reason that, on the Eighth Day, He said: Let there be windows, doors, shutters, and curtains. And it was so. And He pronounced it good.”

   In re-creating this conversation, I seek to make concrete an ineffable tone that permeated the whole afternoon, a tone of hollow humor and impotent camaraderie. Our words had the energy and inflections of entertainment, but the jokes were feeble, maladroit, forced. Each of us sought to keep the outing light and amusing for the sake of the others while, just beneath the surface, our attentions were on troublesome and saddening things. Generous though our motives were, there was something pitifully inept in our execution.
  The road followed the Gave de Salies that wended, now close beside our wheels and sparkling in the sunlight, now a field away and calm, now hidden in a curve of trees; and it was when we had rounded a turning that revealed two graceful bows of the river beyond and below us that Katya decided we had arrived at the perfect picnic site.
  Monsieur Treville assumed his responsibilities as paterfamilias and supervised the unloading and setting out of our meal, giving instructions and assignments always a moment after the task had been already undertaken, and making suggestions that were light-heartedly ignored. When satisfied that everything had been done as he had directed, he rubbed his hands together and announced that he was famished and that those who were unwilling to dig in with conviction and a certain sense of territorial aggression would doubtless go hungry.
  As it happened, he ate quite lightly, often drifting off into his private thoughts as he sat rather uncomfortably on the sheet that was our ground cloth and stared, unseeing, out over the vista. In organizing everything with such superfluous energy, he, too, had been playing his part in confecting a tone of fun and animation.
  To our general amusement, Paul pursued his role of the comic complainer, grousing about everything bitterly and assuring us that the basic raison d’кtre for landscape painting was to offer mankind the beauties of nature without requiring one to come into actual physical contact with its obscene reality. Furthermore, and more to the point, Katya had forgotten the salt!
  The sheet was littered with the flotsam of the picnic and we had passed a quarter of an hour in relative silence, Katya leaning back on her elbows, her eyes closed, allowing the sunlight and breeze to touch her uplifted face, Monsieur Treville off somewhere in the maze of his thoughts, Paul flat on his back, his hat over his face as protection against the one fly that had attended the repast and had, of course, selected him as its host, and me lost in rehearsal of what I wanted to say to Paul. Katya rose and suggested we go down to the riverbank to collect wildflowers. Paul muttered sleepily that he would rather be struck by lightning, and I claimed to be too contented and lazy; so it was Monsieur Treville who grunted to his feet and trudged along after Katya, explaining to her that many wildflowers—golden-seal, henbane, foxglove, mayflower, among others—that are considered poisonous today, were used medicinally in the Middle Ages. Indeed, there was some reason to believe that….
  And they departed, Katya moving gracefully through the tall grasses, the wind billowing her white dress; and her father following along behind, continuing his unheeded monologue. I watched them until they were lost among the trees bordering the Gave.
  “She loves nature so,” I said quietly to Paul. “I admire—perhaps I envy—the way she embraces life and draws pleasure from simple things.”
  “Hm-m-m,” he grunted noncommittally from beneath his hat.
  “It seems a great pity, when happiness for her is compounded of such simple things as freedom and love, that she should be denied it… surrounded by such darkness and fear.”
  He pointedly kept silent.
  “May I discuss something with you, Paul?”
  “If you must,” he muttered.
  In the most succinct way possible, I told him what I had learned about the tragic event in Paris that had precipitated their flight to Salies. Then I made my case for their not running away from the evil tongues of rumormongers, as gossip would pursue them wherever they went, and they would lose years of their lives in futile efforts to elude the ineluctable.
  He heard me out and was silent for a time. As he had not removed his straw boater from his face, I could read nothing of his expression. He drew a long sigh. “Montjean… what a nuisance you have been, rooting about in our past and lumbering me with your unwanted and worthless advice.”
  “I have not been rooting about in your affairs. And I don’t consider my advice to be worthless… not for Katya, at any event.”
  He lifted the hat from his face and opened his eyes to look at me with an expression of fatigue and condescending pity. “You are making judgments from the dangerous position of one who knows a little… but not enough. I intend to flesh out your knowledge, because learning the facts is not going to be a pleasant experience for you, and I believe you have earned a little unpleasantness. First tell me what you presume happened in Paris.”
  “What happened? Well… I assume the events were as your father presented them—an accidental shooting of a young man whom he took to be a burglar.”
  Paul settled his eyes on me, his expression flat. “And what if the shooting were not accidental?”
  “Not accidental?”
  “What if Father had known perfectly well that the young man was not a burglar?”
  “I… I don’t understand?”
  “Oh really? I thought you understood everything.” He closed his eyes but continued to speak lazily, through slack lips. “Let me tell you a little tale. One night, about two years ago, I returned to our house in Paris after a bout of carousing. The house had an enclosed garden behind it, and in order to avoid disturbing anyone, to say nothing of announcing my profligate tardiness, I entered through the garden gate. As I navigated the path, a bit the worse for drink, I stumbled over the fallen body of a young man who had for some months been paying court to Katya. He had been shot, Montjean. And he was quite dead. A clean shot through the heart. Are you seeing the picture?”
  I could not answer.
  “As you might imagine, I sobered up with a jolt. I knew instantly that Father had killed him. I can’t explain why, but I was absolutely sure. He had several times given voice to his dislike of the young man—a trivial mind; not worthy of Katya… that sort of thing.”
  “But… I cannot believe that your father could… He’s a gentle and kind man. A little befuddled, but not…”
  Paul opened his eyes and rose up onto one elbow to address me more directly. “My father, Montjean, is insane.”
  The matter-of-fact way he said this chilled my spine.
  “It’s in our blood. My great grandfather died in an asylum. One of my great uncles lived out his life incarcerated within his own home, attended in secret by two daughters who never married. A cousin of ours killed himself by stepping in front of a train. It seems that the disease passes along the male line of our family. That is why I must never marry, must never have children. My own father was always a bit of a recluse, preferring to live in past centuries rather than deal with life as it is. When he met my mother he fell in love so totally, so desperately, that friends of hers warned her against the marriage, considering Father’s devotion to be almost unhealthy in its intensity. But she accepted his proposal, and for a little less than a year they were caught up in the swirl of a grand passion. She became pregnant almost immediately, and she died in childbirth. The shock to my father was staggering. It goes without saying that he never loved again… never even looked at another woman. He withdrew into himself and devoted all his emotional life to his studies and to us… to Katya and me.
  “I believe I told you at one time that Katya and I resemble our mother to an uncanny degree. I’ve seen photographs, and the similarity is quite shocking. Unsettling, indeed. I don’t claim to understand the psychological mechanisms—that’s more your bailiwick than mine—but I believe that what happened was this: Father wandered into the garden, his mind all tangled in his studies, and he saw Katya in the arms of a young man. All innocent enough, of course. Young people trying to discover the perimeters of their feelings, the boundaries of their love… that sort of thing. But what Father saw was… his wife in the arms of another man. He returned to his study—stunned and bewildered. Katya bade the young man good-night and retired to her room. The fellow lingered in the garden, all aglow with dreams of a most saccharine sort, we may presume. Again Father comes into the garden. This time he has a gun—one of my target pistols. And…” Paul tugged down the corners of his mouth and shrugged.
  He lay back on the ground cloth and closed his eyes. After a time, he continued. “I cannot know if that is exactly what happened, of course, but I fancy it’s close enough. At all events, when I arrived home that night, I came upon the poor fellow. At that time, I had not yet perfected the distant sangfroid that has become so attractive an element of my character. I was frightened, confused, shocked—indeed, I experienced the whole medley of emotions appropriate to the circumstance. Unable to think clearly, I woke Katya and told her what had happened. You can imagine her state. We talked for hours… late into the night. What were we to do? It was unthinkable that we could allow Papa to go to prison or, worse yet, to an asylum. For much of the time Katya was teetering on the edge of shock. She gripped my hand until the fingernails broke my skin, and she shuddered convulsively. But she did not cry. She has never cried since, in fact.
  “Not knowing what to do, we agreed to do nothing. Not until morning, at any rate. I sent Katya to bed—certainly not back to sleep—and I dragged the body into the shrubbery to conceal it until I had decided upon a plan of action.”
  I sat there unmoving, unable to comprehend all that I was hearing. I remember that the sun was hot on the back of my neck, but I felt a chill of horror beneath the warm skin. The breeze turned a corner of the sheet and covered my outstretched legs. To this day, for some reason I do not understand, the image of my legs covered with the white sheet epitomizes that moment for me. Finally I was able to say, “But what options did you have? Surely your father insisted on facing up to his actions and not allowing his children to become implicated.”
  “Fate delights in its little ironic twists, Montjean. Father did in fact confess, but that is not to say that he faced up to his actions. That next morning, Father remembered nothing of the matter. Nothing. It was gone from his memory. Obliterated. The man with whom I took breakfast, the man who babbled on about some minor point of medieval lore, was totally innocent, had never harmed another human being in his life, was in fact incapable of harming anyone. He remembered not a trace. Indeed, ever since that night, Father’s memory has been weak and perforated to the point of burlesque comedy, as even you must have noticed. Surely you don’t imagine that a vague and distracted mind such as he now possesses could have made him one of France’s most respected amateur scholars. Before the… accident… his mind and memory were like honed Swedish steel.”
  “But, I don’t understand. If the incident was gone from his memory, how could he have confessed?”
  “My dear fellow, I am nothing if not clever to the point of deviousness. I availed myself of half-truths and of all the forces of my imagination to trick him into admitting to the authorities that he had shot the young man, without subjecting him to the horror of knowing that he had killed a human being in cold blood… without making him face the fact that he was insane. First, I told him outright that the lad was dead, shot in your garden. Then I made up the tale that he had tried to force his attentions on Katya, and that, in her panic, she had shot him.”
  “What?”
  “Reserve your astonishment, old fellow. It gets more baroque as it goes along. I convinced Father that, in her state of shock, Katya did not have the slightest memory of killing the man. He agreed with me that it would be cruel—and possibly dangerous to her mind—to allow her to learn the terrible truth. Between us, Father and I concocted the story that he shot the young man by accident, mistaking him for an intruder. So, you see, Father confessed to killing the boy without ever knowing he had actually done it. The police accepted our story after minimal investigation.”
  “Minimal?”
  “We are, after all, a family of some importance. Justice may be blind, but she is not without a sense of social propriety. The poor are grilled and cross-questioned; the rich have their statements taken down, with close attention to accurate spelling.”
  Paul had recounted the events with his eyes closed, lying on his back, his delivery slow and monotonic, almost bored. I wondered if this cold insouciance was a product of his unemotional character, or if it was a defense he had developed.
  “And Katya?” I asked after a silence. “How did all this affect her?”
  “As you would imagine. She was fond of the young man… perhaps even loved him. The fact of his death was shocking; the method of it—by her own father’s hand—was shattering. If she had also known that the shooting was no accident, that her father (or rather the madness hiding within her father’s flesh) had cold-bloodedly shot him down, I daren’t consider what effect it might have had on her. Fortunately, she never knew. So you see, to this day my family survives in a fragile web of interwoven misapprehensions. Katya believes Father shot the young man by error, and that his mental state was precariously shocked by the event. Father believes that Katya shot the fellow in panic after his attempt to violate her. And both of them are willing to do whatever is necessary—to pull up roots and go to the ends of the earth if necessary—each for the purpose of protecting the other. I hope you can appreciate how dangerous it would be for both of them if your probing were to expose them to the truth. Your blundering about in our affairs could easily tear the delicate web of lies that prevents my father and my sister from discovering the horrible and destructive truth.”
  “And you sit at the center of the web. A spider-god controlling their fates.”
  Paul vented a long, shuddering sigh, as though infinitely weary of me. He was silent for a time before continuing in his flat, almost indolent tone. “It would not have been a matter of the guillotine for Papa. It would have been an asylum. Have you ever experienced an asylum for the criminally insane, Montjean? Do you have any idea what they’re like?”
  “As a matter of fact, I have. I did a year of internship at the Passy institution before coming to Salies.” I did not confide to Paul that my experiences at Passy had turned me away from all thoughts of pursuing my interest in the new science of psycho-analysis. I had found the treatment of the mentally ill, even at such an advanced facility as Passy, to be brutal, degrading, horrid. The nurses and attendants seemed to have been dredged up from the lowest orders of society. The case which, in my mind, italicized the horrors of institutionalization was that of a young woman I shall call Mlle M. She was young and very pretty, beneath her slovenly, indeed disgusting, faзade. The event that had driven her beyond the boundaries of reality had to do with incest. No purpose would be served in detailing it further. Mlle M. used to wander the grounds of Passy, her expression bland and distant, her soft eyes empty. The most salient manifestation of her condition was her practice of soiling herself and refusing to allow anyone to clean her up. Despite my natural disgust, I felt particular compassion for her, and after many months of gently, slowly bringing her to have confidence in me, I learned something that shocked me and filled me with rage. During her first weeks at Passy, the gentle and withdrawn Mlle M. had been subjected to frequent and rather bizarre sexual assaults on the part of guards and attendants who, as I later discovered, considered such opportunities to be one of the privileges associated with their unpopular occupations. Mlle M. confided in me with expressions of sly pride that it was to protect herself from these assaults that she had devised the practice of soiling herself and making herself too disgusting to be desirable.
  With outrage and fury I reported what I had discovered to the hospital administrator, who warned me against giving credence to the distorted rantings of persons who, by definition, were adrift from reality. But he assured me that he would look into the matter.
  Over the next several months I devoted a great deal of time to Mlle M., whom I discovered to be a charming, very intelligent young woman, despite the deep bruising her mind had undergone. Slowly, and not without several discouraging setbacks, I convinced her that the danger to her person had passed, and that she could dare to live without the horrid armour of her own feces. I remember the delight and sense of accomplishment I experienced one morning in late spring when she arrived at the little conference room, fresh and clean, her hair brushed and tied back with a bit of ribbon. I knew better than to make a great fuss about her victory over her dreads, but she smiled with shy pleasure when, at the end of our chat, I mentioned in passing that she looked particularly nice that morning.
  She failed to attend her next conference, but I was not unduly surprised, as she had missed several over the course of our relationship, and it is not uncommon for a patient to retreat for a day or two after some barrier has been broken through. But when she failed to appear the following morning, I went in search of her.
  I found her in her cell, attended by a dour matron whose martyred “I-told-you-so” expression revealed her longstanding mistrust for this newfangled approach to treating—pampering—the insane. Mlle M. was coiled up on the floor in the corner of the cell, snarling at me like a rabid animal, her dress torn to shreds, her cheeks raked and bloodied by her own fingernails, stinking of feces she had smeared over her arms and into her hair. I realized instantly what must have happened to her—probably on her way back to her cell from our meeting. Because she had trusted me, she had dared to make herself clean… and desirable.
  I knelt down beside her and reached out to touch her shoulder consolingly, but she recoiled and snarled at me. Hate glinting in her narrowed eyes, she snatched up her torn dress, revealing her bare privates, and hissed, “Your turn! Your turn! Your turn!”
  I burst into the office of the administrator, demanding an immediate investigation leading to maximal punishment. I was met by the callous indifference of the official whose greatest desire is to avoid unnecessary trouble and publicity. It was obvious to me that he would do nothing more than go through the motions of an inquiry because, as he informed me with a slight shrug, we had to remember that the insane tended to invite this sort of thing—they enjoy it, really.
  When I screamed at him that I intended to bring the entire matter to the attention of the press, his eyes hardened and he rose to face me. In cold, measured tones, he reminded me that everyone at Passy knew of my particular attentions to Mlle M., and that our activities during our “sessions” were common knowledge.
  My first blow broke his glasses, my second his nose.

   I was immediately dismissed from the staff, and the evaluation written into my record was such that I could give up all hope of ever being accepted into a desirable practice. It was because of this damning evaluation that I was so surprised and grateful when Doctor Gros invited me to join him for the summer at his clinic in Salies.
   I had been silent for a time, remembering these experiences, before repeating to Paul, “Yes I have some acquaintance with institutions for the criminally insane.”
   “Then you know that they are unspeakable places. I visited one when I was trying to decide what I would do if Father ever had a relapse. Those poor, drooling inmates bereft of the slightest dignity. Those hectoring guardians with their brutal, meaty faces. All babble and stench. I could never allow such a fate to befall a cultured and scholarly man like my father. After our mother’s death, he concentrated all his affection on Katya and me. It was our birth, after all, that had cost him the wife he loved beyond the capacity of most men to love. Our debt to him can never be repaid.”
   “But if his distorted identification of Katya with his dead wife could bring him to kill once, could it not happen again?”
   “That is possible. And that is why I keep careful watch on him, looking for the slightest signs of derangement.”
   “I take it these ‘signs’ have appeared again?”
   After a pause, he nodded.
   “And that is why you made the sudden decision to flee from Etcheverria?”
   He nodded again.
   I understood then why Paul had demanded that I conceal from his father the fact that I was fond of Katya; why he had warned me against touching her, taking her in my arms. He saw me as the next victim of his father’s madness! All his actions and motives, which I had ascribed to an unhealthy jealousy, were now clear.
   But it was not Paul who occupied my concern. “Poor Katya,” I said softly. “How unjustly life had closed in around her! And she tries so to find a little joy in the beauties of nature, to amuse herself with her silly jokes… those painful puns. Good God, she can’t even allow herself to be held in the arms of a man who loves her!”
   “Yes, poor Katya.” Paul sat up. “Poor Paul, if it comes to that. Even poor Jean-Marc, I suppose. But—above all—poor, poor Papa.”
   “No. Not ‘above all’! I am sorry for him, but his life is nearly spent. You and Katya are still young. And you’re sacrificing yourselves, wasting your lives!”
   “We have no choice. We’ve discussed it, and we agree. How could Katya be happy, knowing she had purchased that happiness at the cost of her father’s being walled up with babbling madmen and sadistic keepers? As for me…” He shrugged. “Don’t waste your compassion on me, Montjean. I have carefully positioned myself in life so as to avoid the excesses of either happiness or pain. I have cultivated a safe and judicious shallowness. I have tastes, but no appetites. I laugh, but seldom smile. I have expectations, but no hopes. I have wit, but no humor. I cultivate intelligence, but abjure profundity. I am remarkably bold, but totally without courage. I am frank, but never sincere. I prefer the charming to the beautiful; the convenient to the useful; the well phrased to the meaningful. In all things, I celebrate artifice!” He paused and grinned. “And some might even accuse me of being self-pitying.” Then he shrugged. “At all events, the life you accuse me of gambling away is not worth all that much anyway. If indeed I gamble, it is only with small change.”
   “But what of Katya’s life… and mine? They’re worth saving. What are we to do?”
   “What we shall do is—” His eyes focused beyond my shoulder, “—is pretend we have been having a light-hearted little chat. For there they are, coming back up the hill. And we must do everything to give them an amusing and memorable day. Well, damn my soul if she isn’t clutching an armful of stinking weeds to shove up my nose!”
   I spoke quickly. “Paul, listen. Before they arrive. Allow me a few minutes alone with Katya when we return to Etcheverria. I agree that you and I must make today as light and pleasant as possible for them, and I don’t intend to say a word during the fкte. But I insist on having an opportunity to tell her that I understand everything now. I want a last chance to persuade her to come away with me, to save herself.”
   “It’s no use. She won’t go with you. Her sense of family is too strong. She loves her father too much.”
   “I must have one last chance to convince her! Give me half an hour! A quarter of an hour!”
   Katya and Monsieur Treville were near enough that she could wave and gesture towards the mass of wildflowers she was carrying.
   “Paul? Please!”
   “It’s too dangerous for you to be alone with her. Papa might see you.”
   “I accept the risk. It’s my responsibility.”
   He gnawed his lip. “Very well, Montjean. You can have your quarter hour alone with her at the bottom of the garden. But for everyone’s sake I must exact a price. You must promise that you’ll never return to Etcheverria after tonight. I must have your word. When Katya refuses to run off with you—as surely she will—you must never try to see her again. It’s too dangerous. Well?”
   Monsieur Treville approached us, taking off his panama and wiping the perspiration from his forehead with a large handkerchief. “That’s a hard climb, young men! But it’s beautiful down by the Gave. You should have come with us.”
   “No, thank you,” Paul called back. “Too much beauty rots the intellect—rather like sugar and the teeth.” Under his breath he said, “Well, Montjean? Have I your word?”
   “Yes,” I whispered. “I promise.” Then at full voice I asked, “What have you brought us, Katya? Good Lord, have you left any flowers down there at all?”
   “Of course! I only took the ones that looked lonely.”
   “Well, now!” Monsieur Treville said, rubbing his hands together. “Let’s set to tidying things up, then let’s be on our way to the fкte d’Alos. Think of it! I shall see with my own eyes the ritual of the Drowned Virgin! Now there’s something! And to have the doctor here as my guide. A young man from the canton. What luck!”
   “Oh, yes,” Paul said in a nasal off-tone. “What appalling good luck.”


* * *

   Since Paul chose to take his turn at the reins with Katya beside him, Monsieur Treville sat beside me in the back. He confided to me that his stroll along the river had put him in mind of the degree to which waterways had dictated the location and prosperity of medieval villages. “The Dark Ages were not ‘dark’ in the sense that they were devoid of the light of learning. They are ‘dark,’ not because they lacked light, but because we who examine them are partially blind. We know much, but we know all the wrong things. We know of the kings, the wars, the treaties, the great commercial waves and tides. The bold faзades of the era are quite clear, but we don’t know what happened behind those faзades. We have little feeling for the affairs of everyday life, the quotidian routine, the fears and aspirations of the common man. By and large, we know what he did, but we don’t know how he felt about it. And the medieval man’s feelings are more significant to an understanding of his time than are the feelings of the modern man to an understanding of today, for that was an era in which superstition mattered more than fact, belief more than knowledge. It was an age of miracles, and demons, and wonders. That is why I am so eager to witness the pastoral of Robert le Diable and the ritual of the Drowned Virgin.”
   “I am interested in that myself, Papa,” Paul said over his shoulder. “Frankly, I applaud the practice of drowning all virgins after the age of, say, twenty-two. It might prompt young women to reconsider impulses towards chastity which are, if not downright selfish, at least inhospitable.”
   “Is that any way to speak in the presence of your sister?” Monsieur Treville said, genuinely shocked. “I know you are only joking, but virginity is not a subject to be discussed in the presence of young women.”
   “Oh? I should have thought it an ideal topic… as opposed, for instance, to promiscuity.”
   “Paul?” Monsieur Treville said warningly.
   Katya turned her face away with a suppressed smile.
   “Have it your way, Father,” Paul continued. “I shall never speak of virginity again, nor indeed of any of the other seven deadly virtues. In fact, I’ve always considered them consummately dull. I may say ‘consummately,’ may I not? Or is consummation also a taboo subject?”
   Katya made a little face at Paul, signaling him to stop ragging their father. “Do tell us of the Drowned Virgin, Papa,” she said, boldly piloting the conversation into safer waters.
   “Ah, there’s a fascinating story, dear. One that is celebrated every year during the fкte d’Alos, which we shall be attending today. I suppose Jean-Marc here knows the tale better than I, as he must have attended the fкte every year of his boyhood.”
   “Actually, sir, I never knew there was any real history behind the event. All I recall is that every pretty girl in the three villages sought to be selected to play the role of the Virgin. It was considered a great honor. The final selection was made by the priest—still is, I suppose.”
   “Who’d be in a better position to know?” Paul asked.
   “Oh, yes, indeed,” Monsieur Treville said, “there is firm history behind the tradition. In 1170, a famous Judgment of God was inflicted on Sancie, the widow of Gaston the Fifth of Beam. (I wonder why she’s always referred to as a virgin?) She was bound hand and foot and cast into the Gave—that very river off to our right—to test whether she had been guilty of killing her infant, which was born rather a long while after the death of her husband. It was her own brother, the King of Navarre, who designated the method of the trial. It was assumed that if she floated to the surface, then God supported her contention of innocence; but if she drowned, then that was God’s judgment against her. Ah, they had a real God, those medieval men! A God who inhabited the rivers and the rain; not a distant God such as we have, one who is little more than a broker for eternal punishment or pleasure. God lived in every village in those days… and the devil, too. Why, I recall an incident in Abense-de-Haut in 1223 in which….”
   Sitting beside him on the rocking surry, while he held the brim of his panama against the wind and held forth on his muddled but generously humanistic views of history, I could understand why Paul considered his father to be innocent of killing that young man whose only crime had been loving Katya. Could anyone justly claim that this man whose memory contained not a trace of the incident, was a murderer? Had not the crime been committed by another person lurking within—in a way masquerading as—Monsieur Treville? And would justice be served if he were punished, locked away in some stinking asylum for an act of which he had no knowledge, no memory? I could understand Paul’s dilemma; it was my dilemma as well. But overriding all considerations of justice was the welfare of Katya. Her happiness… her life perhaps… must not be sacrificed to circumstance. And was I innocent of considering my own happiness as well? No, probably not.
   “But, Papa, aren’t you going to tell us what happened to the poor woman?” Katya asked, interrupting her father at a bridge between digressions.
   “What poor woman?” Monsieur Treville wondered.
   “The one who was bound hand and foot and thrown into the river!”
   “Oh, her. Well… she floated!”
   “Good for her,” Paul said. “Smart thinking. But then, I suppose it was the only sensible thing to do under the circumstances.”
   “Yes, yes, she floated. And when she was pulled out of the river, she was returned to all her former riches and power.”
   “And her brother?” I asked. “What happened to him for sacrificing his sister to his own views of right and wrong?”
   Paul turned and settled his calm metallic eyes on me.
   “History records that he continued his long and uneventful reign,” Monsieur Treville informed us. “And to this day the event is celebrated in the fкte d’Alos—Good Lord! What is that!” He turned and looked back at the source of the braying klaxon behind us. A motorcar with ornate brass headlamps had overtaken us and was signaling for us to pull off the road and let it pass. The occupants, two young men and three young women decked out in the fashionable sartorial impedimenta of motoring, were shouting and laughing and waving their arms as they neared, the front of their vehicle nearly touching our rear wheel, and they convulsed with delight when our horse shied and panicked at the noise and unaccustomed appearance of the machine. Paul had all he could do to hold the horse in check as we lurched off the shoulder of the road and into the shallow drainage ditch, nearly overturning our trap. The klaxon sounded a long, taunting blare as they passed, and the young athletic-looking man steering the motorcar shouted out something about “…the Twentieth Century!” as they bounced away in a swirl of dust and acrid petrol fumes, shrieking with laughter at the fun of it all.
   White-knuckled with fury, Paul held the horse in, as the rest of us descended carefully from the high side of the trap to avoid turning it over. Katya’s first concern was for the horse, which was staring back in its panic, revealing white all around its eyes. With no fear of its rearing or nipping, she stroked its nose and cooed to it until the shuddering of its neck muscles calmed and it was gentled enough to be led up onto the roadway.
   While common enough in the cities by the summer of 1914, motorcars were still a rarity in the countryside, and I had never before seen one on the narrow dirt roads of the Basque provinces. The sassy young driver had called out in what I recognized to be a Parisian accent (which the others could not distinguish, as they were from Paris themselves and assumed the clipped, half-swallowed northern sound to be correct and accent-free). The borish young people were doubtless out on a motoring adventure into the unpenetrated hinterlands and having a bit of sport with the local rustics.
   As we continued our trip, I reflected on the characteristic ways in which each of us had reacted to the event. I had been frankly frightened; Monsieur Treville was inspired to ruminate on the inevitable erosion of ancient village traditions that would follow motor transportation; Katya was solicitous of the horse; and Paul had stared after the motorcar, his expression morbidly calm, his eyes cold and flat.


* * *

   When we approached Alos over a narrow bridge, it was late afternoon and the sun was already beginning to slide towards the mountains that held the village as though in a lap. The thin cry of the txitsu flute and the rattle of the stick drum from the village square told me the pastoral of Robert le Diable was in progress. My recollection of the dance was that it was an interminable and dreary thing, so I was less anxious to view it than were Katya and Monsieur Treville. Paul suggested that they walk on ahead while he and I attended to the horse. We would find them later. They joined the stream of families and couples flowing towards the square, while Paul and I recrossed the stone bridge to the outlying field that had been converted into a temporary yard for rigs and horses, which were tethered and given fodder for a small fee. The man in charge recognized me from years before, and it was inevitable that he thump me on the back and ask after many people of whom I had only the vaguest memory. As the conversation was in Basque, Paul was excluded, and he drifted away as I sought to disengage myself without appearing unfriendly. The price of freedom was an appointment to do a txikiteo, a tour of the bars and buvettes, with the hostler later that night, an appointment I hoped he would forget.
   I found Paul at the edge of a group of farmers and shepherds, looking off and smiling to himself. I followed his gaze and saw the motorcar that had almost overturned us. It was stationed beneath a tree at the edge of the meadow, its brass headlamps glinting back the low angle of the setting sun.
   “They have been delivered into my hands,” Paul said quietly. “It’s enough to reawaken one’s belief in divine justice.”
   “Oh come, Paul. For Katya’s sake, let’s just enjoy ourselves. Forget it.”
   He smiled at me. “My dear fellow, I haven’t the slightest intention of forgetting it. Well, Doctor? Shall we locate the others? I am looking forward to this evening. I confess I had feared it would be infinitely dull, but things are beginning to look up.”
   “Remember your shoulder. It wouldn’t do to hurt it again.”
   “You’re such a good-hearted and solicitous fellow. Perhaps you should consider taking up medicine as a career? Come now, let’s set ourselves to the arduous business of having fun.”