the gulf of experience and pain that separates two centuries, two cultures. Those of us whose lives are draped across that war find their youths deposited on the shore of a receding, almost alien, continent where life was lived at a different tempo and, more important, in a different timbre. The things we did and said, our motives and methods, had different implications from those they now have; therefore, it is possible for a description of those things to be completely accurate without being at all truthful.
But I have promised myself that I would revisit, touch, and handle all the memories of that summer and Katya, and I must do this, although I am not at all confident that I can convert those memories into meaning.
I first saw Katya at a distance. I was sitting right here, beneath this ancient tree on the riverside park, my notebook in my lap as it is now. I was daydreaming under the guise of meditating, when I looked up and noticed her walking across the deep lawn towards me. My first glance, a squint from beneath my straw boater, was casual, and I returned to my thoughts, only to be attracted again almost immediately. I later told myself that I had sensed something of significance in her approach, but that is nonsense. It was probably the determination in her strong stride that captured my attention. The ladies who took the air and waters of Salies strolled around the paths of the park with studied aimlessness, gossiping as they engaged in attractive light exercise, always in twos, for ladies in those days did not stroll in a park alone. Katya’s purposeful stride had none of the rhythms of strolling.
I was a bit embarrassed and uncertain at her approach, once I determined that, for lack of alternative in the empty park, I must be her objective. Should I stand to greet her? Would that not seem forward, as she was a stranger to me? On the other hand, how could I receive her sitting with my back against a tree, a notebook in my lap, my skimmer down over my eyes? One has to be young and of a certain temperament to find confusion and embarrassment in such trivial social incidents, and I was exactly the right age and temperament. I sat up and looked around rather theatrically, seeking to communicate to her that I was searching for the object of her quest and was not so bold as to assume it was I. Then I stood, took off my straw hat, and awaited her arrival with a smile that fluttered weakly for want of sure purpose.
“Mademoiselle?” I ventured when she was standing before me.
“You are Dr. Montjean?”
“That is one of my burdens, yes.” It was a habit of mine to rehearse social situations and to develop what I thought were cultured and interesting responses to simple questions. The effect was rather stilted and artificial, and I almost always regretted the words as they escaped from my mouth.
“My brother has had an accident, Doctor.” The matter-of-fact way she said this suggested there was no great urgency.
“Oh?” I looked across the park, half expecting to see someone approaching—a friend, the brother himself— for who would send a young lady to fetch a doctor if there were others available. “Ah… where is your brother now, Mademoiselle…?” I lifted my eyebrows in gentle request for her name.
“He’s at home.”
“At home?”
“Yes. We live at Etcheverria. Do you know the house?”
I confessed that I did not.
“It’s two-point-six kilometers from Salies, up the Mauleon road.”
I had to smile at the precision. “Two-point-six kilometers
She nodded. “Shall we go?”
“Ah… by all means. I shall have to collect my bag.” She turned and began to walk across the grass towards the village square before I could offer my arm, so I found myself awkwardly hastening to catch up with her. “Ah… how did you come into the village? Have you a trap?”
“I rode in on my bicycle. I left it in the square.”
Young women of that era sometimes teetered about on bicycles for amusement and display, but the use of them for transportation was not common, inhibitions of propriety no less prohibitive than inhibitions of dress. I found her indifference to those inhibitions intriguing. “Can you tell me something about your brother’s accident, Mademoiselle…?”
“Treville. Oh, I don’t believe it’s anything really serious, Doctor. He fell from his machine.”
“His bicycle?”
“Yes. We were having a race, and he fell.”
“A race? I see.” I glanced over at her profile and was taken by the golden, suntanned cheek and the healthy complexion, uncommon in women of the middle class where pallor was not only accounted an element of beauty, but a cherished proof that one was leisured. She was hatless, a lapse of sartorial propriety when women wore fluttering, broad-brimmed hats even when motoring or riding. Her full dark hair was drawn back in a soft bun, but wisps had escaped to float about her temples—disarranged, no doubt, by her bicycle ride of exactly two and six-tenths kilometers. It would not be correct to describe her as a beauty, for there was too much vigor in her features, too much energy in her expression, to satisfy the popular ideal of plump passive beauty. One might more accurately call her a handsome woman… I thought her a very handsome woman indeed. I was looking at the graceful line of her neck, the nape of which was brushed by soft commas of hair, when she turned to me, her eyes asking why I was staring at her in that way.
“Ah… and what is the nature of your brother’s injuries?” I asked quickly.
“Well, he’s a bit scraped up, of course. And it could be that he has a broken clavicle. But there’s no concussion.”
I frowned. “I am impressed, Mlle Treville. You seem to have some knowledge of medicine.”
She shrugged and puffed air between slack lips in the way that peasants or street gamines dismiss some insignificant matter. “Not really.”
“But most people, and nearly all women, would have called the clavicle a collarbone.”
“One summer I developed an interest in anatomy, and I read several books. That’s all. There’s no mystery.”
How can I explain the implications of a young lady in the summer of 1914 admitting to an interest in anatomy? It would be as though one of today’s pert Modern Young Things were to confess to a fascination with pornography. The conventions of polite conversation did not admit the existence of the human body, much less its parts separately considered.
We had passed out of the park and were walking along the tree-lined central avenue of Salies towards the clinic. Two women on the other side of the street stopped to exchange whispers about the hatless girl walking brazenly with the young doctor. And indeed there was something in the vigor of Katya’s long, athletic stride that might be considered unladylike. It would not be exactly fair to say that ladies of that time
“How can you know your brother does not suffer from a concussion?” I asked.
“His eyes respond to light by a contraction of the pupil,” she answered with a tone suggesting an unnecessary statement of the obvious. “How else would one test for concussion?”
“How else indeed,” I said, a bit nettled. “I take it there was also a summer’s reading devoted to diagnostics?”
She stopped walking and turned to me, puzzled by the archness of my tone. Her eyes searched mine in a most disconcerting way, with an expression of sincere interrogation mixed with amusement, an expression I was later to find particular to her, and very dear to me. “I’ve been guilty of invading your domain of authority, haven’t I?” she said. “I am sorry.”
“Oh, no. It isn’t that at all,” I protested.
“Isn’t it?”
“Certainly not… well, yes frankly.” I grinned. “After all, I am supposed to be the wise old doctor, and you the distressed and admiring patient.”
She smiled. “I promise to be as distressed and admiring as possible the next time we meet.”
“Ah, that’s more like it.”
“And you must play the wise old doctor… well, the wise young doctor.”
“Young… but dignified.”
“Oh, yes, dignified to be sure. Tell me, would it damage your dignity to learn that we have walked past the clinic?”
