The Summer of Katya

I had a flash of insight. “When she was fifteen and a half?”

“Yes. Just fifteen and a half.” She looked at me and smiled thinly. “I take it you’re thinking about her ghost?”

“Yes, I was. What happened to Katya when she was fifteen and a half?”

She frowned, seeming to recoil from the memory. “It’s not a pleasant thing to think about. It’s an ugly… shameful…”

My intuition told me that Katya would not be able to recount the event, whatever it was. I would have to learn it through Paul. “Please tell about it… Paul.”

She was silent for a time; then she began to speak, her eyes fixed on the middle distance, out across the ragged garden. “I had a friend visiting for a month that summer—a handsome rogue of a fellow several years older than I who was introducing me to the delights of gambling and other civilized dissipations. We were out on the town almost every night, if not playing cards, then putting the street walkers of St. Denis into… amusing situations. It was all typical of young men of my class. Wild oats and all that. Good dirty fun.

“It was this fellow’s practice to pay a kind of teasing court to Katya, as men in their twenties will do with teenaged girls, delighting in their shyness and awkwardness. They used to chat over dinner or take little strolls in the garden. As you might expect, she was both pleased and flattered by his attentions. He was a dashing rake, and she was poised—teetering, really—between adolescence and young womanhood. I never thought much of it. Indeed, I joined in the game, teasing her about her little infatuation, the way a brother will.

“There was a cruel streak in that man, one that came out in his treatment of the St. Denis girls. But it never occurred to me to worry about his behavior with Katya. After all, we were gentlemen of the same class, and Katya was my sister. Of course, she wasn’t Katya then. She was still Hortense. The shy, blushing Hortense…” Her eyes lowered and she seemed to drift into reverie.

After a moment of silence, I said, “And?”

Her hands were folded on her lap over the pistol, and she dug the fingernails of one hand into the palm of the other. “He… he raped her.” Her eyes searched mine frantically, seeming to ask if such a horrible thing were possible. “He raped Hortense. He raped Hortense!”

I had anticipated that with a growing dread, but my stomach went cold at the words, uttered with such a tone of desperate pity for the long-dead Hortense. I wanted to hold her, to console her; but I pressed on, hoping to cleanse her mind of the terror by making her talk about, confront it, expose the wound to the healing effects of understanding. I was careful to keep my voice neutral and atonic when I prompted, “Yes. He raped Hortense.”

She took several deep, calming breaths, and her voice was gruff again when she spoke. “This fellow and I came home that night, late as usual, but somewhat drunker than usual. I fell into my bed and was dead to the world in a minute. He must have slipped out of his room and tapped at her door. He suggested that they take a stroll in the garden under the moonlight. It was a soft, beautiful night, and she was as full of the gossamer excitement of romance as any adolescent girl. No doubt there was a thrill of daring to sneak out and walk with a man in a moonlit garden.” Katya smiled and glanced at me almost coyly, her eyes round with impish mischief as she caught her lower lip between her teeth and lifted her shoulders. “I was embarrassed and flustered about my appearance. My nightgown was one of those long shapeless flannel things—not at all feminine. And my hair had been taken down for bed and was all tangled and…” She touched her hair, and her expression faded from animated excitement to uncertainty and fear….

For an instant, and for the only time, I had met Hortense. The gentle ghost in the garden.

… Her expression faded as her fingers recoiled from the feeling of hair that was cropped and plastered down with water. Clouds of confusion crossed her eyes. Then her jaw muscles tensed and she spoke again in Paul’s voice. “I told you there was a streak of cruelty in the man. Hurting the St. Denis prostitutes was a part of his pleasure. And furthermore he was drunk. He… he threw Hortense down into the mud of a flowerbed, and he beat her with his fists… he beat her!… her lips were broken… and he hit her in the stomach… hard… again and again!”

“You don’t have to tell me if it’s too painful.”

“…He pressed his fingers against her eyes! And he told her that if she screamed he would push her eyes out—like grapes popping out of their skins—that’s what he whispered in her ear—like grapes popping out of the skin! He pressed so hard she could see flashes of light! And the pain! Then he… Then he…!”

“You don’t have to tell me, Katya!”

“Oh, Jean-Marc! He did such things to me!” She was crying and the words caught in her throat.

But as I rose to take her into my arms and comfort her, her expression chilled. Her face flattened and her lips grew thin, and her eyes, still damp with tears, hardened. I put my hand on her shoulder and patted her, as one might pat the shoulder of a male friend in emotional distress.

When she spoke again, it was Paul’s atonal, slightly nasal voice. “I shall never know why, but I awoke at first light that morning, despite the fact that I was heavy with a hangover. I decided to take the air of the garden to clear my head. I found her there… sitting in the garden swing… quite nude. Her flesh was like ice and she shivered convulsively. Her face was… was all battered and swollen. She just sat there, rocking herself, staring ahead, humming one note again and again. I put my robe around her and brought her back to the house. She came docilely. I don’t believe she even realized I was there. As best I could, I cleaned her up and put her into bed and heaped feather comforters over her. She didn’t resist, but she didn’t help herself either. She was like a body empty of spirit. I sat beside her for hours, stroking her hair and telling her that everything would be all right… everything would be all right. She just lay there, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. I doubt she understood what I was saying, but there may have been some slight comfort in the sound of a human voice. Finally… late in the afternoon… she fell asleep. Her eyelids closed suddenly, and she was in a deep sleep… so deep that I was afraid for a moment that she was dead.”

Katya stopped speaking, and she concentrated on lightly stroking her palm where the fingernails had pressed in, leaving deep reddish dents. I let my hand fall from her shoulder and sat down again, pulling my chair closer to her. “But of course she didn’t die,” I said. “She survived.”

She smiled thinly, bitterly. “No, she didn’t die. But she didn’t survive either. To keep Katya’s shame from the servants—I thought of it that way! I thought of it as her shame! Jesus Christ, Montjean, how can men think of it that way?!” She closed her eyes and drew a long, shuddering breath before continuing. “To keep her shame from the servants and the outside world, I made up the story that she had smallpox and was quarantined. Only I could attend to her needs, as I had already had smallpox and was immune. For two weeks I sat with her day and night. I had a cot brought in and I slept there; I fed her from a tray sent up and left outside the door; and I talked to her hour after hour, keeping up a flow of soothing nonsense, recalling silly things we had done when we were children, telling her about my plans for when she got well—anything to avoid the silence. For, you see, she never spoke. She just lay in her bed or sat in a chair by the window. Withdrawn. Silent. Her eyes never looked into mine. In time, her bruises healed, but she remained detached and somehow… elsewhere.”

“That must have been a very distressing time for you as well, Paul. After all, you were a very young man yourself.”

She nodded. “Yes. It was for me that nondescript summer between school and university. I was ahead by two years, you see.” She looked at me in Paul’s archly bored way. “I was quite a brilliant lad, in my own shallow way. Precocious. And with this newfound friend of mine I was trying my wings for the first time, as it were. Men are so lucky. I wish Katya had been born a boy. Oh, how Katya wished she had been born a boy! If only she had been the boy! Men don’t get raped, you see! It isn’t fair!”

“I understand.”

“It isn’t fair! It’s so much safer being a man!”

I touched her arm. “You’re right. It isn’t fair. It isn’t just.”

“How do you know?” she snarled.

There was a flash of hatred in her eyes; then it melted into an expression of hopeless pity. “Yes… Katya should have been born the boy.”

After a moment of silence, I said, “Paul, you mentioned a moment ago that Hortense didn’t die, but didn’t survive either. What did you mean by that?”

“Just what I said. Hortense never recovered. Only Katya did. One day I returned to her room after being gone for a short time, and I found her fully dressed for the first time. She greeted me with a flood of cheerful small talk, and she was full of energy and plans. She wondered if we could go to the park; perhaps we could stop at a patisserie on the way; she was starved, and she had a particular hunger for pastry, the sweeter and gummier the better; and she wanted to go on a clothes-buying spree. She said the dress she was wearing was the only one that pleased her. It was a white dress reserved for lawn parties. Perhaps you have noticed that she only wears white: the color of chastity?” This last was said in Paul’s most ironic tone. “I was relieved and delighted with her return to vigor and an appetite for life, and I told her we would walk through all the parks in Paris, and eat the patisserie shelves bare, and return home with a carriage full of dresses—all white, if that’s what she wanted. In the course of saying this, I called her by name, but she frowned and told me that she was no longer Hortense. She had a new name. Katya. She asked what I thought of it. I told her I thought it was a perfectly wonderful name for a wonderful, wonderful young lady.

“During the weeks that followed, she was all gaiety and song, full of life. Full too—I regret to say—of a newly found enthusiasm for that most base form of humor, the pun—plays on words, double meanings, near rhymes, and sometimes not so near. I used to complain about this moronic level of wit, until it occurred to me that there was something particularly fascinating for her in words with two meanings, in symbols reflecting two realities. After all, her body had housed two quite different personalities; ‘Katya’ and ‘Hortense’ were synonyms; she was a kind of living pun. Several times during those early weeks I tried, as obliquely as possible, to refer to what had happened to her. I wanted her to feel free to talk about it to me; I wanted to let her know that there was no shame in it for her, no fault. I even dared to mention the man’s name once. Just a glancing reference, of course, in passing. She reacted with a light joke about not seeing him about anymore, and she wondered if her obvious crush on him had driven him away. I realized that it was gone, vanished; the horrible episode was erased from her memory. Hortense couldn’t live with the memory of the rape, so she was replaced by Katya, who had no such scar on her past.” She looked at me with that searching blend of curiosity and amusement that was characteristic of her. “And that was all there was to it, you see? The memories were all gone. All gone.” She smiled and shrugged.

“You’re sure they were all gone?” I asked.

There was an almost imperceptible change in her eyes, which had softened to become Katya’s eyes. They became shallow and brittle. When she spoke, it was with Paul’s harsh throatiness. “Oh, of course, bits of it came up from time to time, like flotsam after a shipwreck. There were her white dresses, for instance. Her sudden interest in anatomy. Her fascination with the writings of that Austrian fellow—Freud. I suppose that, without realizing it, she was trying to understand what had happened to her… and why. But it was a long time before the poison came to the surface. A long time. Years and years.” Her voice trailed off as her mind seemed to release whatever she was thinking of. She looked down at the pistol in her lap and frowned, as though noticing it for the first time. Then she brought it to her breast and hugged it while she looked out across the garden to the cloudless sky beyond.

“Paul?” I said uneasily. “May I have the gun?”

“What?” She stared at me with a frown of comic disbelief, as though that were the silliest request she had ever heard. “Certainly not, old fellow! What an idea!”

A horripulation of dread tingled down my spine. I rose and stretched. “Would you mind if we strolled along as we talked? My side’s getting stiff sitting here.”

“If you wish.” She preceded me down the path, walking with a cocky step that reminded me of Paul’s nonchalant strut away from the fight at the fкte d’Alos.

The walk gave me time to focus my thoughts towards some kind of understanding. I recognized Katya’s flight from reality to be classic, not unlike those I had read in case studies before my experiences at Passy had caused me to abandon all thoughts of specializing in mental illnesses. The rape had terribly cicatrized and battered the emotions of the romantic, adolescent Hortense beyond her capacity to survive. So Hortense died… became a faint ghost, forever fifteen and a half years old, forever hovering in a garden, and she was replaced by Katya, newborn and therefore virginal. Katya, with her habitual dresses of chaste white. Katya, with her peculiar interest in anatomy and psychology. Katya, who had frozen and retreated into a distant daydream when I held her and kissed her; who had, in a way of speaking, slipped out of the body that might respond shamefully to the urgings of physical love. How frightening and confusing it must have been for her last night, when her preoccupation with the distress of our parting had prevented her from slipping out of her body before the pleasure of love had swept over her! What a blundering fool I was!

And now, for some reason, she could no longer maintain the persona of Katya, and was in the process of becoming Paul. But the transition was not yet complete. She seemed to hover between the two personalities, slipping back and forth, never quite Katya, never quite Paul. Why did she hang in this uncertain twilight between two beings? Perhaps because she could best examine and understand what had happened to her from this ambiguous coign of vantage? She had been explaining things to me—motives as well as events—that neither Katya nor Paul could have understood alone, but which became clear when illuminated by the exterior vision of the one and the interior vision of the other. So long as she resided in this vague no-man’s-land, she could examine her own experiences and memories with Paul’s emotional distance. But what would happen once the examination had been completed? Would she continue her voyage and become Paul? Would she return to Katya?

I walked behind her down the path. The nape of her neck, revealed by the hasty cropping of her hair, seemed slim and fragile in Paul’s too-large collar. I felt that I had to help her learn whatever it was she was yearning to understand. It was my only hope, if ever she were to become again the Katya I loved. “So,” I asked softly, “life for Katya went on more or less as it had been before that terrible night in the garden?”

She shrugged and spoke over her shoulder. “Pretty much. Years passed and she blossomed into a handsome young woman. Considering her station and her family’s position among the gratin of Paris society, she naturally became a focus of social attention by the time of her coming out.” She shook her head and smiled bitterly. “It’s odd, but even her practice of wearing only white was accepted as a kind of… coquettish trademark, you might say.”

“And your father never knew what had happened to her in the garden?”

“Not at that time. Later, it became necessary for me to tell him.”

“Oh? What happened to make it necessary?”

She did not respond. We had reached the summerhouse, and she climbed the steps and sat, by habit, in the battered wicker chair, but she flung one leg over the arm in a slouching posture that Paul might have affected.

I took up my usual station at the entrance, leaning against the arch, one foot up on the steps. “You mentioned that this thing buried so deeply within Katya emerged eventually. Tell me about that, Paul.”

“No. I don’t want to.”

“You do want to actually.”

“No!”

Following the methods I had learned at Passy, I remained silent for several minutes, waiting for her to take the lead. The only sounds in the fading, late-summer garden were the drone of insects and the trilling calls of birds high up in the trees. When at last she spoke, it was in an atonic voice, as though without volition. “There were always young men around her. She was, after all, young… clever… not totally unattractive. Her intelligence and her keen sense of the ridiculous drove the most pompous of them away, as she scorned the practice of most women of her class, pretending to be silly, stupid, and easily impressed so as not to frighten off the ‘good catches.’ Suitors came and went; then one fellow seemed to emerge from the pack—a pleasant enough person, good-looking, kind, romantic, and of passable means and connections. I found him tolerable, if tiresomely idealistic and intense.” She glanced at me with Paul’s cocked eyebrow. “As you see, her taste is fairly consistent.”

I smiled and nodded.

“In the course of time, the fellow began to appear at our door almost every evening—”

“This was Marcel?”

“Yes, Marcel. He and Katya would talk in the salon, mostly about poetry and love and such rubbish, or they would take long walks in the garden. Then… one night…” She slipped her leg off the arm of the chair and sat rigidly. “…One night…” She fell silent and stared ahead.

“Then one night?”

“What?” she asked vaguely.

“Then one night…?

“I was in my room writing letters. I heard a gunshot from the garden. I rushed down to find her just returning through the garden doors. She walked past me, not seeing me, staring ahead and humming one note over and over again. ‘My God, Katya!’ I shouted at her. ‘What has happened?’ But she just continued past me up the stairs towards her room. On the terrace I found my target pistol. And in the garden… I found the young man. He was… he was…” She stopped speaking and stared ahead, her eyes fixed.

“He was dead?”

She nodded slowly, and continued nodding like a mechanical toy until I asked:

“But what had happened? Why had she shot him?”

She didn’t answer for a time; then she looked at me with an expression of impish cunning. “I couldn’t know for certain. I wasn’t there. Only Katya could know what happened.”

“All right… yes… I realize that. But tell me what you think happened, Paul.”

“I can only surmise. Perhaps the young man grew passionate. Perhaps his love made him hold her long and tightly in a kiss. Perhaps she began to feel stirrings of pleasure deep within her. Ugly, shameful, disgusting pleasure! Perhaps she broke away and ran into the salon. Perhaps she found the gun. Perhaps she considered killing herself… punishing herself for feeling that foul, shameful pleasure. But then… perhaps… she realized with sudden clarity that it wasn’t she who had sinned, it wasn’t she who deserved punishment. It was the young man in the garden—the young man who had raped her! Who had hit her in the stomach again and again! Who had hurt her eyes! Who had done such painful, horrible things…!” Her eyes were wild, and her body shuddered with the force of her passion. She stiffened and clenched her teeth, calming her breathing with great effort. Then she looked at me, her eyes narrowing with infantile craftiness. “I don’t know all this, of course. I can only surmise.”

“Yes, I understand that. I understand. Look… Paul… before this happened, you had no indication that Katya was approaching a breakdown?”

She shook her head. “No, none. Well… none that I then recognized as an indication. I had thought it was all gone, all buried beneath layers of emotional scar tissue—if you will allow me to borrow a metaphor from your field. It is true that she had mentioned, rather light-heartedly, a ghost in the garden… a young girl all in white. But I didn’t make anything of it. She had always been an imaginative girl, given to making up stories for the fun of it… just to have people on.”

“And that was why you reacted so strangely that night when I mentioned her ghost in the garden?”

“Exactly. It was not until that moment that I recognized the ghost as a symptom of approaching breakdown. After all, Doctor, it takes at least two events to make a pattern. But I knew instantly that we had to leave this place… leave you… as soon as possible.” She looked at me uncertainly. “I probably warned you that you were in some personal danger. It would be like me to do that.”

“Yes, you did. But I thought you were threatening danger from you. I assumed… but that doesn’t matter now. I take it Katya retained no memory of shooting the young man?”

“Not a trace. By the time I went up to her that night, she was lying in her bed, reading. She chatted light-heartedly, even inflicting some of her wretched puns on me.” She glanced at me obliquely. “Fond of her though you were, even you must confess that her puns could be painful.”

I smiled. “On the contrary, I find them charming.”

She pushed out her lower lip and shrugged.

She had spoken of Katya in the past tense; I had replied in the present, unwilling to accept that the transformation to Paul was accomplished and permanent. “Paul? If she had no memory of the event, how did you account for the young man’s death?”

“It was Father who did that. After discovering the young man dead in the garden, I had to tell him everything, all the way back to the rape that had been the cause of her imbalance. He was stunned, of course. Stricken. But he rose to the task of protecting the daughter he loved so much, the daughter who was so like the wife he had lost. He used to be a clever and brilliant man, you know. It was he who devised the scheme of telling her that he had had a breakdown and had committed the murder while temporarily mad. In that way, we tricked her into cooperating with us to conceal from the world what had actually happened. It was then that the complicated tapestry of falsehoods became so baroque and fragile. Katya believed that Father had committed the murder but had no memory of it. That night she crept down and overheard us talking through the study door, overheard me tell Father that she had killed the boy. Confused, shocked, she returned to her room and lay awake through the night, trying to reason out why I would tell so terrible a lie. I need hardly tell you, with your morbid fascination with the drivel of Dr. Freud, that the human psyche has enormous capacity for reshaping unacceptable reality into palatable fictions. She managed to convince herself that I had lied to Father, using the very sincerity of my voice as evidence that I was not telling the truth. She fabricated a rationale that involved my telling Father that she had killed the young man in order to trick him into confessing to an accidental shooting, when in fact he had killed in the throes of insanity. Do you see what I mean by ‘baroque’? When she told me the next morning that she understood everything, I grasped the chance to protect her from the truth and confessed that she was correct in her assumptions.” Katya looked at me with a lifted eyebrow and Paul’s mirthless smile in her eyes. “Is all this sufficiently complicated and tangled for your taste, Montjean? I believe you Basques have a particular penchant for the devious and the oblique.”

“But, obviously, she eventually learned the truth. How did that happen?”

She frowned and seemed to struggle to comprehend this dangerous paradox. Then her face became heavy and expressionless and she asked, in the strained rasp of Paul’s voice, “What makes you believe Katya ever discovered the whole truth?”

How could I explain that I knew because it was she who was telling me? I sensed this was a dangerous line to pursue, so I retreated and sought another avenue that might bring her to a liberating understanding of all that had happened. “So your father confessed to having killed the young man accidentally in order to protect Katya from discovering that she had done it. What happened then?”

“What happened? To Father, you mean?”

“Very well. What happened to your father?”

“His worry about Katya, and the dangerous legal inquiry into the boy’s death, drained his spirit. I knew he could never withstand another such incident. That’s why I brought them here, out of harm’s way. And when it began to happen all over again, with you— Why in God’s name did you persist in your attentions to Katya?! I warned you again and again! Goddamn you, Montjean! Goddamn you and your ******* interference!”

She used a term that even Paul would never have uttered in public. I lowered my eyes and said nothing. And I remembered with a shudder how Mlle M., at the Passy asylum, would occasionally burst out in gutter profanity so shockingly dissonant with her personality and breeding.

When she spoke again, her voice was calm, even hollow. “Then last night, Father heard the shot and ran out to find you lying on the ground, clutching at his boot and begging him to help you. He stood there, stunned. It had happened again! His daughter… his Hortense who looked so like his beloved wife… was totally, irremediably insane. He recoiled from you, lying there, pleading, the proof of Katya’s diseased mind. He turned away and walked back to his study as though in a trance. He sat at his desk; he carefully rephrased a footnote he had been working on; in the margin he cited a confirming cross-reference; then he closed his notebook and… and he shot himself. Shot himself. Just… just…” Her voice trailed off.

“How do you know what happened in the garden? Were you there, Paul?”

She frowned at me, as though slightly annoyed by the irrelevancy of my question. “What? What do you mean?”

I had found a little chink in the welding of Katya’s personality to Paul’s, and I hoped it would be possible to pry them apart gently, without destroying the fiction that was sustaining her. “How can you describe what your father did in the garden, Paul? Were you there?”

She shook her head. “No, I… I was in my room… asleep.”

“I see. Then how do you know what happened?”

“Well… well, Katya was standing right there in the shadow. She hadn’t moved from the spot after leveling the target pistol at you and pressing the trigger.” Her brow wrinkled with the strain of trying to understand. Then she looked at me defiantly, her eyes harried, as she said quickly, “Katya must have told me about it.”

“Did she?”

“Yes. Yes. She must have. How else—what does it matter how— Oh yes, I remember. Katya woke me to tell me that you were lying wounded in the garden. That’s when she explained what had happened. I dressed hastily and rushed down.”

“Your father was still alive at that time?”

“Yes. He was still in his study, writing. It wasn’t until Paul returned that he found him. Dead by his own hand. And he—”

“What? Paul returned to find him?”

Her eyes flickered. She drew a quick breath but continued airily, “Yes, I found him when I returned from bringing you to the clinic at Salies. I carried him up to his bedroom so that Katya wouldn’t blunder in and discover him looking… with the side of his face all… Afterwards, I searched for her everywhere, and at last I found her sitting in her wicker chair in the summerhouse—sitting here just as I am—and I knew at first glance that something had ruptured in her mind when she shot you, allowing all the terrible, insupportable truth to rush in. She remembered everything. The rape of Hortense. Killing poor Marcel. And she told me all about it, calmly, succinctly… almost clinically.”

“But, Paul, listen. Try to understand this. If she can remember all of it, then there’s a chance for her to recover! Don’t you see that? With time and professional help, she might be able to live a full life with someone who loves her!”

But she closed her eyes and shook her head. “No. The floodgates to all that pain and horror opened for only a moment… a confusing and horrible moment… but even as she described events to me, the details began to grow fuzzy… distorted. The shock of seeing you on the ground, of thinking you were dying, opened the old wounds for a moment, but the searing rush of agonizing memories cauterized them again, sealing the flow, closing them… but not healing them.” She looked at me, her eyes sad and gentle, and she spoke in her own voice. “She had wanted so desperately to protect you from a danger she sensed but did not understand. She even told you that she did not love you, hoping to drive you away, keep you safe. Can you imagine what pain it must have cost her to look into your eyes… those black Basque eyes… and tell you that she did not love you?” The hint of a minor-key smile touched the corners of her eyes as they looked into mine for a long affectionate moment. Then her expression hardened, and when she spoke it was in Paul’s harsh voice. “Then quite suddenly, while she was trying to explain to me why she had been forced to shoot you—vague, shattered babble about your having made her feel evil, shameful pleasure… and something about the rape… and some incoherent business about eyes squirting like grapes from their skins—quite suddenly she turned on me, shrieking and beating her fists against my chest.