The Summer of Katya

“Are you sure you know the whole truth? Do you know why your father shot the young… this Marcel?”

“I believe so. I have considered it a great deal, and I believe I understand. There was the staggering shock of my mother’s death. There were the years of concealing his grief beneath a heavy schedule of study, of trying to insulate his pain with work. And all that time, the unexpressed grief festered within him. Then one night at an unguarded and vulnerable moment… perhaps he had been thinking about her, sitting in his study and remembering… perhaps weeping. He stepped into the garden for a breath of air… he saw his wife in the arms of another man… I look very much like my mother, you know. Yes, Jean-Marc, I think I know what happened.”

“Then you must realize that the feelings he has for you are morbid. You do realize that, don’t you?”

“They’re not feelings for me. They’re feelings for his wife.”

“They’re morbid all the same. And there is no reason in the world to believe he won’t break again, won’t kill another young man whose only crime is loving you and holding you in his arms.”

“Exactly! And that is why we must leave here, Jean-Marc! Don’t you see?”

I ran my fingers through my hair. “But you mustn’t leave! I mustn’t lose you! I love you, for God’s sake!” I stopped short at hearing myself say the words so violently. Then I repeated softly, “I love you, Katya.”

Her eyes searched my face with concern; then she gazed out over the moonlit garden as she seemed to ponder some inner puzzle. When she spoke, after a long silence, it was with a distant voice. “I am twenty-six years old, Jean-Marc. Twenty-six years old. My mother died when she was just twenty. It’s a very strange feeling to be older than your mother. Think of it. I am six years older than my…” Her voice trailed off into reverie.

“Katya? There’s something I must ask you. I believe I already know the answer, because a person in love is sensitive to the one he loves and can read all the little signs and hints. But you’ve never said it in so many words. Katya… do you love me?”

After a moment of silence, she said, “You know that I am very fond of—”

“—I am not speaking about fondness or liking or friendship. Do you love me?”

She smiled faintly and rather sadly. “My determined, passionate Basque.”

“Do you love me?” I insisted, my pulse quickening as an unforeseen doubt began to rise in me like a cold shadow.

She touched my cheek with her fingertips, then cupped it in her palm. Her soft eyes looked into mine with what I feared was pity. She lowered her gaze and withdrew her hand. “No, Jean-Marc,” she said softly. “I don’t love you.”

The earth seemed to drop away beneath me. For a second, I was numb. Then the hurt began to sting behind my eyes. I had to swallow to suppress the knot of tears in my throat.

She spoke almost in a whisper. “I won’t tell you how fond of you I am, Jean-Marc, because I know that would only add to your pain. But please believe me. I am very sorry that I don’t love you. I can’t explain why I don’t. I’ve daydreamed about loving you. I want to love you. I even feel I ought to. But…”

I turned away so she could not see my face. My voice was strained and thin when I spoke. “And the man in Paris… your Marcel… did you love him?”

She was silent for a long moment. “I was young and romantic enough to delight in the thought of being in love, but… no. No, I’ve come to the realization that I shall never love. Not everyone has that capacity, you know. So you see, even if it weren’t for Papa, I could not stay with you. I couldn’t…. Are you crying? Please don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying.” I turned my face even farther from her and struggled to make no sound as the tears hitched in my throat and streamed down my cheeks. “Please… don’t look at me. Give me a minute. I’ll be all right. Forgive me.”

She was sensitive enough not to come to me, not to console me, while I brought the first rush of pain and emptiness under control.

After several minutes I was able to breathe more evenly and the flow of tears stopped. “I’m sorry,” I said, wiping my eyes with my fingers. “These last few days have been hard. I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry about,” she said softly.

“There!” I scrubbed my cheeks with my palms and turned to her, smiling damply. “There we are! Childish breakdown completely under control. My goodness! You must not be feeling very well, young lady. You look all blurry. We are trained in medical school to recognize blurriness as a serious, but seldom fatal, symptom of… I can’t remember what of, just now.” The forced gaiety must have sounded as hollow and false as it was.

Her voice had a caressing quality like that of the soothing noises we make to a child who has fallen and scraped his knee. “You deserve happiness, Jean-Marc, and I know you will find it one day. You are so sensitive… so kind. And you’re very brave.”

“Brave? Yes… well. It’s a trick we Basques have, young lady. We conceal our courage behind tears. It fools our enemies into thinking we’re weak.”

“Dear, dear Jean-Marc.”

I sat on the steps of the summerhouse, my back to her, and looked up at the dark branches above us laced with a tracery of silver moonlight. She had just told me that she did not love me, and I believed her—my mind believed her. But in my soul and heart, I could not accept it, could not even comprehend it. I had never thought of love as something one person felt for another. I had always conceived of love as a state, a condition outside the two persons, a kind of shared shelter within which both could find comfort and confidence. So how could it be that I felt so total and intense a love, while she…?

Nor could I console myself with the possibility that she might one day come to love me. Young and romantic as I was, I could not view love as something one could grow into, a contract the items of which one could negotiate one by one. Either love was whole and absorbed you totally, or it was not love. It was something else. Something more reasonable and calm, perhaps; something quite nice in its own way… but something I did not want.

After a time, I drew a long breath and spoke to her, my voice calm, but thin and toneless. “All right. I accept that you don’t love me, Katya. But I love you. I don’t intend to burden you with my love, but I can’t deny it either. It exists. And because I love you, I cannot allow you to waste your life, running forever from fears and shadows.”

“There’s no point in trying to persuade me. I love my father… even as you say you love me.”

“Love him? Well, perhaps. But you don’t respect him.”

“That’s not true! How can you say that?”

“Do you really believe that if your father knew you were sacrificing your youth and future to protect him, he would allow it? You and Paul are making decisions on his behalf that he would never make himself. You’re treating him as though he were a mindless infant.”

“Jean-Marc, my father is…”—she had to press the word out—”…insane.”

“Yes, insane. But not irrational. He’s capable of love, of feeling, of making decisions for himself.”

Her voice hardened. “You’re not thinking of telling him the truth, are you?”

“I have considered it, yes. I’ve considered every means of saving you. But no, I don’t intend to tell him. It’s not my place to do that. It’s your place, Katya. Or Paul’s.”

“I never could. And if you did, I would hate you forever.”

I smiled bitterly. “I had hoped to hear you confess your love for me tonight. But instead, I’ve only discovered conditions under which you would hate me forever. I’m not doing very well, am I?”

She came down the steps and sat beside me, slipping her hand under my arm and laying her head against my shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Jean-Marc.”

I nodded and pressed her hand between my arm and side. Though the touch and warmth of her pleased me, it eroded my all-too-frangible barriers against the tears that began to sting and prick against the backs of my eyes. I compressed my lips and rose, stepping away to prevent her from seeing me cry.

But she came to me, taking me in her arms, pressing against me and rocking me gently, as though I were an injured child. I clung to her desperately, my cheeks against the side of her head so she could not look into my face. Her hair was soft and warm, and soon it was damp with my tears. I brushed her hair with my lips, then her ear, her neck, her throat… and my mouth found hers. I felt her body soften and blend into mine. Her pelvis pressed against me so hard I could feel the bones, and I pressed back, as though wanting to break the two layers of skin that separated our flesh. She squirmed against me; a little gasp and whimper caught in her throat as her fingers clutched at my back; she stiffened and held me with such force that her muscles trembled….

….Her body went slack in my arms; our kiss softened to a light touch of lips; then our mouths separated and I could see her eyes, moist and infinitely soft. Then confusion and fright grew in her eyes, and she pressed her hands against my chest and drew away, and all the warm places where we had touched together seemed cold. With nervous fingertips she brushed wisps of hair from her forehead, her glance anxious and averted.

“Oh, Jean-Marc,” she said breathlessly. “I’m sorry. That was terrible of me. It’s never happened to me before—that… feeling. I didn’t know! But… nothing has changed. This does not mean that I love you. And that’s why it was terrible of me to do this… to feel this. Please forgive me.”

“Katya…” I reached for her.

“No!” She stepped back, her eyes large with fright. Then she repeated more calmly. “No, Jean-Marc. No. Now I… I must go back to the house.”

“Please don’t leave me.”

“I must!”

“Katya, do you know that I promised Paul that I would never again try to see you after tonight?”

She lowered her eyes and nodded. “Yes. And I’m sure it’s best.” Her breathing was still shallow. “Yes, that is best. Now I must go.”

I yearned to say something that would make her stay. I wanted to take her into my arms and comfort again the cold places. But what was the use? What was the use?

I drew a long breath. “Well… good-bye, then, Katya.”

She didn’t look up at me. “Good-bye, Jean-Marc,” she said softly. And she turned and went up the path to Etcheverria.

I watched her go, dapples of pallid moonlight rippling over her white dress until she had disappeared among the ragged overgrowth.

* * *

I can’t say how long I sat in her wicker chair. Ten minutes? An hour? Impossible to know. My knees tight together, my eyes focused unseeing on the floor of the summerhouse, I felt infinitely alone, and I had a premonition that I would be alone forever. There was no bitterness in this realization, only a kind of calm hopelessness.

And even now, as I pen this description years later, my heart goes out to the lost and empty young man I picture sitting there. I no longer feel the pain. But I remember his… vividly.

Logic tells me that what I shall now relate could not have happened as I remember it. I cannot re-create the events and sensations objectively. All I can do is to describe what I recall to the limits of my skill, accepting that the memory retains only a distorted record of traumatic experiences.

I was sitting there—how long does not matter, for my distress was beyond time—until at last the floor of the summerhouse came back into focus and I found myself shivering with the late-night damp. I drew a long, shuddering sigh that stung my lungs. I had better return to Salies. Why not? What was to be gained by sitting there? I pushed myself out of the wicker chair numbly and started down the steps. I felt a shock, as though I had walked into a solid wall, and there was a blaze of pain in my right side. I think I remember a flash of red light, but I believe it was behind, not in front of, my eyes. I recall no sound, no explosion, but I knew—as one knows things in a nightmare—that I had been shot. The garden lurched to one side, and I was clutching at the doorframe of the summerhouse. My lips must have been pressed against the frame, because I remember the grit of flakes of paint in my mouth. Ice spread through my stomach. Ice in my legs. A tingling weakness down my spine. And the ground rushed up at me as I fell, not to the ground, but through it. Through it… and down, down, tumbling in an echoing chaos of blackness. I can feel the nausea as I write this, and my fingers weaken around the pen. Down and down. Splotches of dim light appeared below me and rushed upwards past me. And there was a sound, like a single bass note of an organ, droning in my ears. I realized with a dreadful calm that I was dying. I am dying. I was faintly surprised to be dying, but quite serene. I am dying. Don’t struggle. Don’t fight it. Let it come.

But no! The animal in me cried out. Live! Live!

I rushed towards another blotch of dim light, and I knew with a sureness beyond reason that this would be the last of the light and everything beneath would be blackness. The glow swelled as I yearned myself towards it. It smeared and swam, then came into focus. Moonlight. A tree of grass close before my eyes. A boot. The toe of a man’s boot. I reached out and grasped the boot to arrest my endless fall. But the boot was tugged from my hold. With all my strength, I looked up, and there, far above me, bulging and rippling like a reflection in water, was Monsieur Treville’s face.

“Please… please…” I muttered through a thick tongue.

His face registered horror, and he recoiled from me.

I heard his voice, hollow and distant. “Oh, my God! My God!”

The blackness was rising inside me again. I could feel its chill shadow swell from within. “Please?…”

And I fell back into the void. An endless blackness… no sound… no light… tumbling… floating…

… floating… towards something white… with lines in it… bars… squares… a window. A window that widened into a wall, all white.

The white walls of the clinic at Salies? What? The clinic?

“Well, well. Lazarus-like, he returns from, if not the dead exactly, at least the thoroughly damaged. Here, drink this down.” Doctor Gros held up my head and set a glass to my lips. “Bottoms up, as the cancan girls say.” The last swallow caught in my throat, making me cough, and the convulsion seared my right side with pain. “Nasty-tasting stuff, I know. But my patients wouldn’t think it efficacious if it were palatable. Something to do with the Christian assumption that pleasure is evil and pain redeeming, I shouldn’t wonder. No, no, don’t try to talk. You’ve lost a lot of blood, and you’ve undergone a general somatic shock. But no vital organ was hit. You’ll live to a ripe old age—not that the medical profession has much cause to rejoice at that prospect.”

“What… what happened to… where?… where?…” I couldn’t think clearly.

“You really should try to polish up your skills as a conversationalist, Montjean. Babbling is for politicians and priests. But I’d rather you didn’t talk for a while. I’ll explain a bit to set your mind at rest. Young Treville brought you here in their cariole. He said something about an accident while he was showing you his target pistols. Considering what we know of the history of that family, I assume that was a lie. Naturally, I considered contacting the gendarmerie, but in view of your relations with the family, I thought I’d better wait until you regained consciousness. And you certainly took your time about that. It’s early morning. I’ve been sitting up with you all night. You’ll doubtless have a relapse when you see my bill. Well? Is it a matter for the gendarmerie?”

I shook my head weakly.

“Hm-m-m. I don’t know how wise that is. But I’m willing to concede that it’s your affair. I’ve been pondering this most of the night—nothing much else to occupy my mind, you understand. I assume it was the old man who shot you?”

“I don’t… I couldn’t see.”

“Well, it stands to reason, doesn’t it? After all, he has earned a reputation for that sort of social excess.”

I resented his trivially joking tone, but I was too limp and empty to admonish him.

“It couldn’t have been the brother who shot you. If he is the expert shot he’s reputed to be, you would be out of your misery—administering to the medical needs of the Heavenly Host, whatever those needs might be. Palliatives for boredom, probably. Or restoratives after the shock of meeting up with friends and family you’d thought you were finally rid of forever.”

I turned my head to the window. “It’s morning?”

“Yes. You’ve been unconscious all night. I stood at the window and watched dawn come—a thing I haven’t done in years, and one I hope I shall be able to avoid in the future. It threatens to be another beautiful day, for all the good that does you.”

“Please… please help me get up.”

“Don’t be stupid! You know, something just occurred to me. I wonder just how good a shot the Treville boy would be, considering that he would have to shoot with his left hand. Something to ponder, eh? Food for thought.”

“Dr. Gros? I must go to Etcheverria. Katya…”

“Listen to me, son. Your wound is still fresh. The bullet just clipped your side. You’re luckier than you deserve. You’ve benefited from God’s peculiar affection for fools, drunks, and lovers. But you’ve lost a lot of blood.”

“I must go!”

“Don’t be an ass, Montjean. That was laudanum I gave you just now. In a few minutes you’ll be unconscious and out of harm’s way. There’s no point in fighting it.”

I could already feel a velvet numbness rising in my brain. Although I knew it was futile, I could not help struggling against it. Katya needed me. When the opiate finally overwhelmed me, I went under in a nauseating turmoil of resistance and terror.

When I emerged again into consciousness, I was alone in the room, bathed in sweat and so weak that it took concentrated effort to lift my head and look towards the window. From the quality of the light I knew it was midafternoon. With trembling effort, I sat up and gingerly slipped my legs over the side of the bed. A wave of giddiness passed off, leaving me with a throbbing headache. I tugged up my nightdress and pulled off the plaster to examine my wound. It was tender and raw, and two ugly black threads merged with the redness where Doctor Gros had stitched it closed, but the wound was quite superficial and there was no bleeding. I redressed it; then I ventured to stand beside the bed. There was dizziness and a swim of pain, but I could stay on my feet. My clothes were hanging on a peg on the far wall, and I got dressed, moving cautiously, leaning against the wall each time a wave of light-headedness overcame me. My clothes were soiled, and the shirt was stiff with blood on the right, but I did not dare return to my boardinghouse for a change lest Doctor Gros discover my absence and make a commotion. Slipping unnoticed out the back door, I made my way to the stable where I found the boy drowsing on a pile of loose hay. He harnessed up the mare for me, and soon I was out of Salies and on the road to Etcheverria.

The shaking of the trap was painful at first, but the stiffness slowly worked itself out, and the cool breeze and lemon sunlight began to refresh me and renew my strength.

I did not dare anticipate what I would find at Etcheverria. Indeed, I had only the vaguest idea of what I would do there; but I felt that Katya needed me, and nothing in the world could have kept me away.

The poplars lining the lane up to the house blocked the breeze, and the sound of the mare’s hooves seemed peculiarly loud in the silence as I passed the decaying wall of the overgrown garden. I descended from the trap and stood for a moment in the graveled courtyard. The front door of the house gaped wide open, and the only sound was the moaning of the wind high in the treetops. There was an undefinable but most palpable ambience of desertion about the place. A cold dread stiffened the hairs on the nape of my neck, and I knew instinctively that I was too late. Too late for… I did not know what.

I passed through into the central hall and called out Katya’s name. No answer. I looked into the salon. No one. The dining room was empty. I went down the short hall to Monsieur Treville’s study and tapped at the door. There was no response. I pushed it open and stepped in. The desk was stacked with books and papers in the toppling disarray I remembered, and the floor was strewn with open boxes and piles of books, as though the old scholar had stepped out and would return at any moment to continue packing for his move to yet another home.

At the foot of the staircase I called up, “Katya?” No answer. “Katya!” Silence. I climbed the stairs quietly and stood in the upper hall where I had never been before. The walls of the stairwell were bright with diffuse sunlight from the open front door below, but the hall was dark and all the doors leading off it were closed. I had no idea which room was hers. I tapped at the nearest door and, when there was no response, I pressed it open and peered in. The shutters were half-closed, and the only light came from the softly billowing curtains which glowed, alive with a blur of sunlight that was blinding in the darkness. I could dimly make out a figure on the bed… a man… fully clothed. “Paul?” I called softly. “Monsieur Treville?” The figure did not stir. I quietly approached the bed.

It was Monsieur Treville lying on his back atop the counterpane, and I noticed that his boots were still on. “Monsieur Treville? Sir?” The breeze pressed the glowing curtains out, and briefly the face was brilliantly visible before it receded back into the gloom.

My glance winced away in shock and disgust. There was a small black hole in the right temple, and the upper third of the left side of his face was blown away. A wave of nausea rose in me, and I felt my knees go slack. I caught myself on the bedstead and held on until the faintness passed; then I stumbled out of the room and stood in the hall, giddy. Through the vertiginous stupor of shock, I clung to one thought: I must find Katya! The two remaining doors off the hall were closed. I forced myself to approach the nearest and put my hand on the knob. It took all my concentrated will to turn the knob, dreading what I might find within.

“That’s Katya’s room, Montjean.”

I gasped and spun around. Standing at the head of the stairs in the heavy shadow was Paul’s figure, difficult to distinguish against the bright walls of the stairwell.

“You mustn’t disturb her.” The voice was peculiar… harsh… strained. “She’s been through a terrible experience. Let her rest.”

I peered at him through the dark of the hall. He had a strangely rumpled appearance; his clothes hung slackly on him; his hair looked oddly chopped and disarranged. And the target pistol he held in his right hand dangled at his side.

But the face, barely discernible through the gloom… The soft sensitive eyes…

A wave of horror chilled my skin. “Katya?” I breathed.

“She’s resting, I told you. I won’t have her disturbed.” She constricted her throat to force the note of her voice deeper. The effect was a ghastly rasp that made me shudder.

I had to think! I had to control my emotions. Be calm and think. “May I… may I look in on her… Paul? Just for a second?”

She stared at me for a long moment. “Very well. But don’t wake her. She needs her rest. She is weary… so weary….” The tone of plaintive compassion contrasted eerily with the macabre rasp of her voice.

My heart pounding, my mind awash with fear, I pushed the door open partway. This room, too, was heavy with shadow, deepened by the contrasting glare of sunlight through the gently billowing curtains. I closed the door softly behind me and crossed to the bed. Paul lay on his back, his arms at his sides, his legs straight and stiff. He was dead. She had covered him with one of her white dresses, its collar tucked under his chin, its arms carefully placed over his arms, giving the impression that he was wearing the garment. And his face, in repose so like hers, lent grotesque realism to the illusion.

“Oh, my God,” I breathed.

I folded the dress down and discovered a blot of dark blood over his shirtfront, in the center of which was a small black hole. He had been shot through the heart. But there was no blood on the counterpane upon which he lay. He had been shot somewhere else and carried—dragged, more likely—up to her bedroom. I shuddered to imagine the terrible effort it must have cost her to drag and tug his limp body up those broad stairs and into her room. And heaving it up onto the bed…

I carefully replaced the dress over him, and I stepped back into the hall, closing the door behind me.

She had not moved from the head of the stairs, where she was a silhouette of shadow against the glowing walls of the stairwell. “Is she sleeping?” she asked.

I drew a long breath. “Yes. She’s… resting.”

“Good,” she said in her forced gravelly voice. There was a moment of silence.

“I… Paul? May I have a few words with you?” I asked hesitantly.

She raised one eyebrow in Paul’s superior way. “If you must, old boy.” She turned and preceded me down the stairs. As I walked behind her I saw that she had crudely chopped her hair short and had tried to plaster it down with water.

A Drowned Virgin?

When, months later, I could review these events with a clearer mind, I realized that I had felt no sense of personal danger. I was afraid, to be sure, but not for myself. I recognized that Katya was quite mad. I assumed that she had killed her brother and perhaps her father with the target pistol she carried nonchalantly in her hand. There was no reason to believe she might not kill me. And yet, there was no place in the tangle of my emotions for fear. Perhaps the thought of being dead, of being out of it all, had a certain attraction.

My overwhelming emotion was pity… love and pity that tugged my heart towards her. Her body small and fragile within Paul’s ill-fitting clothes, her hair standing up in wet cowlicks, she looked so much the tragicomic clown, half grotesque, half pathetic, that I yearned to take her in my arms and comfort her. But I realized that if there were the slightest chance of guiding her back to reality, I must allow her to play out the role in which she found some kind of safety, some shelter from the storms raging in her mind.

We entered the salon and she turned to me with a supercilious expression and asked in Paul’s bored drawl, “I suppose you could do with a brandy? After all, it isn’t every day a fellow manages to get himself shot while wooing a young lady in a garden. It’s an event worthy of celebration.”

I accepted the brandy she offered without pouring one out for herself. “Shall we take it on the terrace?” she asked. “It’s another of those tediously exquisite days Katya is forever cooing about. We might as well subject ourselves to its ineffable beauty.”

I followed her out onto the terrace, and we sat overlooking the tangled garden. She sat with her ankles lightly crossed and her knees together, the graceful line of her body contrasting strangely with her costume.

How to start? What to say? I found myself slipping into the cautious, controlled, rather patronizing style of communication I had learned at the asylum at Passy. Hoping to discover how much she was aware of events around her, I began, “How’s your father?”

She glanced at me quickly, mistrust in her eyes. “You were coming from my father’s room when I found you in the hall. You know perfectly well that he’s dead.”

I nodded. “Yes, I’m sorry. How did he die?”

“My dear fellow, I would have imagined that a man of medical training, even one so inexperienced as you, could deduce that he shot himself… took the gentleman’s way out.”

“Out of what?”

“When he found you in the garden, he—” She stopped suddenly in midphrase and stared at me, confusion and doubt welling up in her eyes. When she spoke again, the guttural tone was gone. It was Katya’s voice. “I don’t understand… you were… weren’t you…?” She touched her brow with her fingertips.

“I was shot, yes, but only wounded. Nothing serious.”

“Only wounded? Yes, but…” She was adrift from reality, her expression vague. “Yes, but… I…”

“You say your father found me in the garden,” I prompted. “But it was he who shot me, wasn’t it?”

“Papa? How could you believe that? Papa was so gentle. He could never harm anyone.”

“Listen—” I yearned to reach out and take her hand to reassure her, but I couldn’t tell where she was in the vague terrain between herself and her persona as Paul, and Paul would have recoiled from my touch. I soon learned to read the slight but dramatic indications of her shift from one personality to the other: the husky lowering of the voice, the shallowing of the eyes, the tensing of the mouth into Paul’s habitually disdainful expression. But at this moment I had to guess which one I was talking to. “Listen… Paul? Yesterday you told me about what happened in Paris. Tell me about that again please.”

She put the pistol in her lap and looked out across the garden, her eyes distant, her voice flat. “I probably didn’t tell you the truth yesterday… not the whole truth, anyway.”

That “probably” signaled to me that she had retreated back into Paul, but lacked his memory of events. There was a cunning quality to her negotiations between beings.

“Well, tell me the whole truth now. Begin in Paris, shortly before you moved here to Salies.”

Her eyes hardened, her nostrils dilated slightly, and when she spoke her voice had returned to that forced rasp that chilled my spine. “Oh, it began before that, old boy. Long before that. It began when poor Katya was a young girl just entering womanhood. When she was still the awkward and coltish Hortense.”