festivities. Twenty kilometers would make a long ride back, and we would not return to Etcheverria until the small hours of the morning, but Katya was as excited as a child at the prospect of being up late into the night and riding in an open cariole under the brilliant midnight stars of that perfect summer.
Monsieur Treville grew sleepy and began to nod in his chair by the time I rose to leave. Paul invited me to come again tomorrow for tea after I had finished my duties at the clinic, and he was gracious enough to allow Katya and me a moment alone at the door, where we exchanged the simple words of polite parting with a softness of voice that implied more than it said. Katya placed her hand on my arm. “Thank you, Jean-Marc.”
“For what?”
“For arranging this outing with Papa. It will help to soften the blow of having to move again.”
“I don’t think of this as an outing with your father. I think of it as an outing with you. And for that, it’s I who give thanks.”
She lowered her eyes and pressed my arm.
As I walked back to Salies under a Prussian-blue sky of velvet alive with gemstars, a pervious heaven, I pondered the contrasts of the evening at Etcheverria: the gay chatter at dinner, over against Paul’s dark warnings; the facile joy Katya took in little things, in puns and pebbles, against her sudden retreats into melancholy reverie; the fumbling kindness of Monsieur Treville, against the fear his children had that he might learn of my affection for Katya. It was a canvas painted half in watery pastels, half in lurid impasto. And I had the disturbing conviction that it was the pastels that were artificial, a thin wash to cover more foreboding textures.
Upon reaching my rooms, I found a note from Doctor Gros under my door telling me that he had tried to contact me and that I must visit him at once in his flat attached to the clinic. When I arrived he was obviously annoyed at having sought me without success, but his annoyance was nothing to mine when I discovered he intended to leave the village for two days, and I would have to remain in Salies on call for emergencies until his return.
“But I have made plans that will be awkward to change,” I complained. “Is this trip of yours absolutely vital?”
“It is more than absolutely vital; it’s a matter of pleasure-seeking,” he said, offering me a brandy which I waved away. “One of my dear lady patients has requested that I accompany her to St. Jean de Luz. She’s a widow who takes the cures at various watering places for the purpose of mitigating the discomforts of her celibate state. Under normal conditions, nothing would please me more than to leave you free to pursue your pleasures, unencumbered by duty, but unfortunately some years ago I took a solemn vow abjuring all impulses to waste such sexual opportunities as come my way. Think of me as a victim of Honor, unable to break an oath. And think of yourself as a victim of circumstance. You’re sure you won’t have a little glass?”
“Couldn’t I attend to the clinic during the day and be free in the evenings at least?”
“I’m afraid not, Montjean. Oh, if it were only our lady patients with their hot flashes and cold hearts, I wouldn’t care one way or the other. But, with me away, you will be the only doctor in the parish, and we
“I don’t want any,” I said bitterly.
“Oh, cheer up, man! What’s two days to you, a youth whose primary asset in life is Time? If you look at it just right, I am more to be pitied than you. I shall be embarking only on a tawdry little affair; while you, if I do not misread the symptoms, are in the throes of love. Believe me, young man, you have no grounds for envy. You will be left with fertile memories; I shall be left with only a strong urge to bathe.”
“Yes, but—”
“Perhaps I should put it this way: I intend to leave tomorrow morning, and there’s no point in our debating the matter.”
Lacking alternative, and with a minimal display of good graces, I agreed to attend to the clinic and to remain in the village until his return. But I extracted his promise to pass by Etcheverria on his way and explain why I would not be able to take tea with them that day, or attend the fкte d’Alos the next.
“A commission I shall undertake with pleasure. But a sense of fair play requires me to warn you that, once your young woman casts her eyes on my virile features, untrammelled by beauty or even conventional regularity, I cannot be held accountable for her heart. You’re sure you won’t have a little glass?”
The following day I was harnessed to the routine of the clinic, including a visit to the watering station in Doctor Gros’s stead. His tourist/patients were not delighted to find the crusty old doctor with whom they could share their giggling little double entendres replaced by a young man who appeared crisp and unsympathetic to their imagined maladies.
Late that afternoon the featureless routine was broken by the dramatic arrival of a Basque peasant lad who had caught his sleeve in a farm machine. I was able to staunch the bleeding and save the arm, and I received the tearful gratitude of the panicked mother and even a reluctant handshake from the taciturn father, who, having watched the operation in grim and desperate silence until he was sure the boy was out of danger, then manifest his love and relief by being furious with the lad for risking so precious a life. Because the mother had no French, I had spoken to them in Basque, and I could sense their discomfort at the realization that this doctor was one of them. Like most proud and oppressed minorities, the Basque have developed a defensive armour of racial superiority requiring them to assert that the Basques are better farmers, dancers, lovemakers, fighters, and predictors of weather than the French or Spanish majorities amongst whom they live. But, at the same time, when it comes to important matters like lawsuits or illness, they cannot avoid a deep feeling that it would be wiser to have their affairs and lives in the hands of a cultured outlander. The most brutalizing effect of prejudice is that the victims come to believe, at a deep and unconfessed level, the stereotypes established by the oppressor. For this reason, the father of the injured boy was all the more relieved when it became clear that his son’s life was to be spared and his usefulness around the farm undiminished. He went so far as to offer me a glass of Izarra, although his peasant wariness made him ask how much I intended to steal from him for this slight medical attention.
As I was washing up after they left, I reflected on how Doctor Gros’s insistence that I remain in Salies had been vindicated, for the lad had been rushed into the clinic a little after four o’clock, when I might have been taking a cup of tea on the terrace of Etcheverria. It also occurred to me that, for the first time since I looked up from under my straw boater and saw Katya approaching across the park green, I had passed an hour without the image of her on my inner eye. It was my first experience of the emotional anodyne to be found in working at a calling, rather than a profession—that daily narcotic that was to numb the slow passage of the years following the summer of Katya.
After the clinic closed for the night, the hours dragged by ponderously while, before I had met Katya, I had easily filled my time with scribbling verses, reading novels, and daydreaming about the excitements and challenges of my future. To relieve the monotony, I left my boardinghouse and crossed the square to one of the cafйs. But the conversation at the tables and up and down the zinc bar centered on the impending war with Germany: warnings from Paris; threats from Berlin; saber-rattling from beleaguered, confused Austria; scabbard-rattling from vast, hollow Russia. Some of the older men remembered the wounded
I have before me the notes I scribbled in my journal that night, and the parenthetical comments on those notes added several years later, after the war was over and I was established as the village doctor of Alos. I share them with you uncorrected, revealing the youthful pedantry of Greek-letter rubrics and my romantic pseudo- philosophic assumptions, and also sharing with you the bitter postwar disenchantment of the parenthetical notes.
