The Summer of Katya

by Trevanian

  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 was 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.”

  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 was 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?”