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.”