The Summer of Katya

just strong enough to make him grunt. “You’re a large beast, and it wouldn’t do for you to get in a lucky blow. Shall we call the contest over?”

I felt that the young man would willingly have abandoned the hopeless struggle, were it not for the young ladies before whom he could not allow himself to be humiliated. There was only one humane thing for Paul to do.

And he did that in the next few seconds. With a shout of desperation, the young man rushed at Paul, his arms flailing. He caught hold of Paul’s sleeve and tore his jacket at the shoulder. Paul tugged away and delivered a quick kick to the stomach that doubled the man up with a snort; then he spun and kicked with all his force to the side of the head. The young man rolled over the cobbles and lay unmoving.

As Paul strolled away with studied nonchalance, more concerned over his torn sleeve than anything else, there was a general mutter of praise and approval from the onlookers, and there were exuberant cris basques from adolescent boys who had climbed up onto second-storey balconies to get a better view of the entertainment. The three Parisian girls rushed into the square to play their Nightingale roles over their fallen swain, who was now sitting dazed on the stones, and whose greatest desire was to disappear from the scene of his embarrassment. I drew Katya along with me and we overtook Paul near one of the buvettes.

“May I offer you a glass?” I asked.

Paul turned to us, his eyes shining with excitement. “By all means, Montjean. It’s thirsty work, this teaching manners to young boors.”

“And you loved it!” Katya reproved sternly. “Men never grow up entirely!” But her anxiety over Paul’s welfare was mixed with a hint of pride.

“Just look at my jacket, will you! I wonder if my contribution to the education of that bourgeois was worth it. Ah, thank you, Montjean.” He accepted the glass I brought him and drained it. “Now, that is ghastly stuff. Still, I suppose there’s a subtle economy in being able to use the same substance for both wine and sheep dip. Nevertheless, I’ll accept another glass, if you’re in a generous mood.”

“May I have one as well?” Katya asked.

“Why yes, of course.” It had not occurred to me to offer her a glass of the coarse local wine, but I supposed she felt the need for it after the suspense and tension of Paul’s encounter.

Because it was for the hero of their recent entertainment, the man who slopped wine into glasses at the buvette refused to accept pay for the three glasses, a rare and significant gesture for a Basque, with whom the virtue of frugality precedes cleanliness in its proximity to godliness.

We found space for ourselves on the worn stone steps of the church, where I spread my coat for Katya to sit upon, and we sipped our wine as we watched a group of boys on the square playing at kicking one another in imitation of the exploits they had just observed. The lad playing the role of Paul did so with extravagant pirouettes and much strutting about, while he held his face in a mask of stretched disdain that looked for all the world as though he were reacting to a barnyard stench. Each time this lad kicked out, a nearby boy did an awkward backwards flip and landed in a comically distorted heap on the ground.

“Did I really look like that?” Paul asked, with an amused frown.

“The boy’s underplaying you a bit,” Katya taunted, “but he has captured the essence of your attitude.” Then she turned suddenly serious. “You frightened me to death, Paul. What if the one with the bottle had hit you?”

“I was frightened myself,” Paul said, rather surprising me with the admission. “There were two of them, and they were healthy-looking specimens. So I struck out rather too vigorously at first, meaning to immobilize at least one of them immediately.” He glanced at me. “A man who’s frightened and has his back to the wall can be very dangerous. He doesn’t dare to moderate his attack.”

I nodded. “Why did you play with the second one so long?”

“My dear fellow, it wasn’t a matter of punishing him. It was a matter of humiliating him. I know their type: second generation arrives merchants imitating the accents and behavior of their betters (people like me) but lacking the innate panache to pull it off. Paris is full of them. And humiliating them is a popular indoor sport with men of my class. So far as punishment goes, I had already accomplished that. I rearranged certain features of the motorcar they were so proud of.”

“Yes. We saw the effects of your repairs.”

“Hm-m. Well, I confess to having no technical gifts. But I left them all the bits, so they could have someone more skillful correct any little errors I may have made.”

“You devil!” Katya said, and again the reproval was mock. Then she put her hand on my arm. “Did you know that Jean-Marc spoke out and prevented your little display from becoming what we call a ‘bagarre basque.’ “

“What we call a ‘bagarre’?” Paul taunted. He turned to me. “Was that you shouting out in that comic imitation of a language?”

“It was.”

“Ah, I see. When I saw those belt buckles flashing out of the corner of my eye, I thought for a moment I was for it. I suppose it was a good thing for me that those young buffoons were also outlanders.”

“Indeed it was.”

Having taken advantage of Paul’s distraction to refresh themselves at one of the bars, the band now struck up a high-tempo Kax Karot, and soon there were twenty or more couples dancing and leaping in the square. Most of the candles in the paper lanterns had guttered out, but the dented moon high above filled the square with its pallid light.

Paul rose and offered his hand to Katya. “Are you willing to join your brother in this primitive hopping about?”

She stood and dropped a little curtsy. “We call it a Kax Karot.”

“Oh we do, do we? You will excuse us, Doctor?”

They joined the general swirl of dancers, where Paul’s strong legs, trained in kick-boxing, stood him in good stead when the challenge lines formed to leap against one another. As I watched them I was struck anew by how much they resembled one another, not only in appearance, but in energy and articulation, in idioms of body movement.

It occurred to me that this would be a good time to look in on Monsieur Treville, who might well have been seduced into drinking more than was his wont by his company of old Basque peasants. I found him sitting in the same bar, now much less crowded in result of a continuous drain of people from the fкte to their farms. A nearly full bottle of Izarra was on the table from which not one of the old men had stirred. Can one imagine a Basque leaving a place where the Izarra is free? I hoped that not too many bottles of that insidious liqueur had preceded this one. The flow of talk had reversed, and Monsieur Treville now held forth on some arcane topic that none of the Basque men seemed to be following very closely. But that did not diminish the energy of his monologue until he caught sight of me at the door and gestured for me to join them at the table, where he introduced me around. I was surprised that he remembered each of the men’s names and even pronounced them fairly accurately. Save for a convivial shine in his eyes, he seemed not much the worse for drink and therefore in no great danger of being bilked out of more Izarra than he chose to buy, so I felt free to return to Katya and Paul, but I could not leave without a full round of formal handshaking. One of the old men recognized my name and told me that he had known one of my uncles rather well, so I must have a little glass of Izarra with him (clearly, the bottle had become communal property, a gift from God). Seizing the opportunity for rounds of toasts, another of the peasants revealed that he had once shared a high mountain pasture with my mother’s cousin and therefore must insist that I have a glass with him as well.

I drank down my second glass then jokingly asked if any of them had owned a sheepdog bred from a bitch owned by my uncle’s cousin’s son, and therefore felt the need to offer a toast. The oldest of the men knew my meaning exactly, and his eyes glittered with conniving humor as he said, “No offense to your family, young man, but we must face the fact that your uncle’s cousin’s son’s dogs were not of the best bloodline; therefore toasting them with a round might be a greedy waste of Izarra.”

I grinned back at him and nodded, taking delight in the tortuous subtleties of the Basque mind. What I had really said was: Don’t take excessive advantage of this generous friend of mine. And what the old man had really said was: Who would do such a thing?

How can such a language be translated?