She accused me of stealing her place in the world! Of being born a man, invulnerable to rape, when it was she who should have been born the man! After all, she was older! She screamed out at the injustice of it! And she used words I didn’t know she had ever heard, words that would have made a dock worker blush. She struggled violently against my efforts to hold her in my arms, and she tried to hit me in the face with her fists, all the while sobbing, ‘I should have been the brother! I should have been the boy!’ Then, worn out and empty of hate, she sagged in my arms. And when she lifted her head and I saw her face, stained with spent fury, the eyes wild and haunted, I knew… I knew the flood of memories had passed and were lost forever from the light. Katya was gone. As Hortense had gone before her. She wrenched herself free from my grasp and ran up to the house. Katya was gone, Montjean… gone.” Tears filled Katya’s eyes and her lips trembled. She was weeping silently for the lost Hortense; and Paul was weeping for the lost Katya.

I remained silent until the tears stopped flowing and she sat, staring out across the overgrown garden, her lashes still wet, indifferent to the tear streaks on her soft cheeks.

“You followed her to the house, Paul?”

She looked at me with an expression between bewilderment and annoyance, as though surprised to find me there. “What?”

“You followed Katya to the house?”

She nodded. “Yes… yes…” She drew a long, fatigued sigh.

“And…?”

“It occurred to me in a flash that she might find Father’s body, with his face all… missing, you know. The shock of it might… Oh, Jesus! I burst into the house after her, calling her name. As I ran into the hall, I saw her. She was standing on the landing of the stairs. In her hand was the pistol I had brought up to Father’s room when I carried him to his bed. She looked down at me… cold yet desperate eyes. And, Montjean—Jean-Marc—she had done something very strange, very frightening….” She stopped speaking abruptly, and she sat stiff and unmoving.

The sun had slipped low in the sky, and patterns of leaf dapple over her face covered one eye with a patch of dark shadow, while the other stared dully ahead. The vision scurried eddies of fear down my spine.

“What was it, Paul? What had she done that was so frightening?”

She frowned and shook her head, her eyes clouded and confused. “I don’t understand it. I looked down on her and realized that… that she had somehow…”

“You looked down on her? But she was on the landing, wasn’t she, and you were below in the hall.”

“No. No. You see, that was the hideous thing she had done! She had somehow…”

Her eyes searched the space before them, as though trying to see the events again, trying to understand them.

“She… she burst into the hall, calling out her own name. Then she saw me standing on the landing, and she looked up at me with fear in her eyes, as though I were going to harm her! And, Montjean… she was wearing my clothes. She was pretending to be me! Why, she even—Christ, it was ghastly!—she had even cut her hair! I had just come from finding Father on his bed… horrible… ugly. I had the pistol in my hand, and she stared up at it, as though I intended to shoot her. Then suddenly it became clear to me what she was trying to do. Poor dear! Poor lost Katya was trying to find someplace to hide, someplace to flee to. Years before, she had learned the trick of surviving by dying. She had become Katya, and allowed the soiled, ruined Hortense to die. But now she could no longer be Katya. She knew now that Katya was mad, that Katya had killed the young man in Paris, that Katya had shot you down in the garden because you had made her feel disgusting, shameful pleasure! And when we were children, we used to play tricks on visitors, pretending both to be the same person, to be two places at once. Poor Katya was trying desperately to survive! She was trying to become me! She had no other place to go! But what was to happen to me, Montjean? If Katya became me, where was I to go? For God’s sake! It wasn’t my fault that I had been born the boy!

“I stood on the staircase looking down at her, horrified that she had changed into my clothes and cut her hair. Then a terrible thought occurred to me. Dreading what I knew I would discover, I looked down at my clothes. I was wearing her white dress! How had she done that to me, Montjean? How is it possible? Then I reached up and touched my hair. It was her hair, Montjean! Her hair! She had made my hair long and had done it up in a bun, so everyone would think I was the woman! I didn’t want to be the woman! I didn’t want to be raped! My eyes throbbed, as though someone were pressing his fingers into them! No! No! Then, something became perfectly clear to both of us at the same instant. There was no place in the world for both of us. Only one of us could survive. We loved one another. We were brother and sister. But only one of us could survive. She raised the gun slowly and pointed it at Katya. I looked up at her. I understood what had to be. I smiled and nodded. I looked down at her. I understood what had to be. I smiled and nodded. Then she… then I squeezed the trigger and… shot herself.”

Katya pressed her fingertips against her forehead hard, until the fingers trembled with strain and white dents appeared on her brow; then she raked her fingers back through her cropped, matted hair.

“Oh, God, Montjean! I took her head into my lap. She looked so strange and pitiful with her hair cut short in that way. Her eyelids fluttered and she smiled up at me faintly. Then there was a terrible gurgling sound at the back of her throat! I pressed her face into my chest and begged her not to die! I kissed her! Then she stiffened… there was foam on her lips! And she…” Katya’s eyes searched mine, desperately seeking understanding. “Poor Hortense was finally dead, Montjean. But… but… I couldn’t leave her there, of course. People would come. They would see poor Katya looking silly and queer in my clothes with her hair cut like a man’s. They would say ugly things about her. I had to carry her up to her room. It was so hard! She was so heavy! Limp and boneless, in a way. I managed to put her onto her bed, and I made her look nice again. She was a handsome woman, you know. Not beautiful perhaps, but handsome. I put one of her dresses over her so she would look nice again. It wasn’t until I passed her mirror that I recalled with a sickening shock what she had done to me. The dress she had made me wear was all stained with her blood. And my hair…! I changed into my own clothes and cut my hair—I don’t think I did a very good job of it. After all, old fellow, I’m not a barber. Then I stepped back out into the hall and… you were there. You were alive! Oh, Jean-Marc, I am so happy you’re alive! I’m so happy she didn’t kill you!”

The tears flowed down her cheeks. I took her into my arms and held her tightly, my eyes squeezed shut, my cheek pressed against hers, as her body racked with painful sobs.

In her final struggle to remember as Katya and to understand as Paul she had spoken an unearthly dialogue, her voice shifting in and out of the ugly guttural rasp that was Paul. The effort had sapped her strength, and now she rested her weight against me as the sobs resided and her panicked breathing slowed and calmed. I held her and rocked her gently in my arms. One of her tears found its way to the corner of my mouth. I can taste the warm salt to this day.

Then she stiffened in my arms and pulled away, and when I looked into her amused, metallic eyes, I knew she was Paul now… and forever.

She turned from me and smoothed down her hair with the palm of her hand. She wiped the tears from her cheeks with quick, impatient gestures; then she laughed three mirthless notes and turned to settle her cool, superior eyes on me. “Taken all in all, old fellow, we’ve had quite an exciting couple of hours around here. Pity you missed it.”

The hoarse voice, the smirking tone, the sardonic shallow smile in the eyes. Yes, Katya was quite, quite gone.

I took a deep breath and spoke, my voice husky with tears. “What… what are you going to do now, Paul?”

“Oh, come, old fellow, what options have I? It’s obvious that Katya’s suicide will be set to my account. After all, let’s face it, it’s not the most believable story in the world. And it wouldn’t be the guillotine for me. Nothing that tidy.” She chuckled. “I’m sure that if Katya were here she’d be unable to resist a pun about ‘losing one’s head.’ No, it wouldn’t be the guillotine for me. And the prospect of my wallowing in the filth of some asylum is beneath consideration. Imagine the quality of the conversation—to say nothing of the food!” She chuckled again. “No, no, it won’t do at all.” She mounted the two steps to the summerhouse, took up the pistol from the wicker chair, then sat in Paul’s sprawling, careless way. “Fortunately, gentlemen of my class have prescribed responses to awkward situations of this kind. Katya was right about the advantages of being a man in this society. Now I really think you should be on your way, Doctor. You’re looking a little pallid. Loss of blood will do that, you know, even to the notoriously full-blooded Basques.”

I knew that she—he was right. There was no other way. Katya living on as a spectacle in some asylum? Like Mlle M.? No. Oh, no. And the fact was, Katya was already dead, lying on her bed up in the house.

Drained, adrift in a vertigo of hopelessness, I turned to leave.

But I was arrested by Paul’s lazy drawl. “Oh, by the way, here’s a little something Katya wanted me to give you.” He tugged a small silk drawstring bag from his coat pocket. “They’re yours, I believe.”

“No, not mine. They were gifts to Katya.”

“Oh, really?” He examined one of the pebbles with mild disrelish. “Well, no one could ever accuse you of being a mad spendthrift when it comes to gift-giving.”

“No, I suppose not. Paul? Would you do me a favor?”

“So long as it’s something slight, old fellow.”

“Would you keep those pebbles for me? Just hold them in your hand… for remembrance?”

His metallic eyes softened for just a second; then he grinned. “If that would amuse you… why not?”

“Thank you.” I turned and walked up the overgrown path.

The sun was setting in a russet flush along the horizon as I drove the trap down past the ruined garden wall. The poplars lining the lane were suffused with an amber afterglow that seemed to rise from the earth. The mare’s ears flickered at the sound of the shot.

Envoi

I remember once describing the Basques to Katya as men who never forgive. Never.

During the course of my medical practice, fate delivered a slightly wounded rapist into my hands.

He did not survive treatment.

Salies-les-Bains

August 1938