“Ah-h-h, I see. Yes, of course. Her bicycle. To be sure.”
“I offered to bring it out to her, but she… I don’t know why I am bothering to explain all this to you.”
“Confession is good for the spirit, Montjean. It empties the soul, making space for more sin.”
I rose as the village worthies arrived and excused myself for having to run along without the privilege of their conversation.
After scribbling sketches and impressions in my journal and finding myself several times frozen in midsentence, staring through the page and smiling at nothing, I blew out my lamp and lay back against the bolster. The details of the room slowly emerged through the blackness as my eyes accustomed themselves to the moonglow that softly illuminated the curtain. All that night I drifted in and out of a sleep lightly brushed with images and imaginings that were not quite dreams.
Incredible though it later seemed, I woke the next morning without a trace of Katya in my mind, without the slightest sense of anticipation, beyond a general feeling of good will and buoyancy. It was not until I had made my toilet and was crossing the square to the cafй where I took morning brioches and coffee that the thought that she was coming into town for her bicycle slipped casually into my mind, then leapt, as it were, from thin script to bold italics in an instant, and a smile brightened my face. It did not occur to me to use the word love in assessing my feelings. Katya had, to be sure, been either in my thoughts or just beyond the rim of them since I left her the day before, and I could recall with tactile memory the brush of her soft warm lips on my cheek. But love? No, I didn’t think of love. I was, however, ashamed to have forgotten all about her arrival for almost half an hour that morning. The lapse made me feel inconstant… unfaithful, almost.
The day crawled by, the passage of time marked only by my trivial duties and tasks, and I began to fear that she would not come after all. The deterioration of the weather increased my apprehension as single dazzling clouds, like torn meringues, sailed lazily overhead and began to pile up on the horizon, thickening to a dark pewter. Would she decide not to dare the walk into Salies? What if she arrived, then a great storm broke, making it impossible for her to return home? We would have to seek shelter somewhere. Under the arcades of the square? No. Beneath a fine old tree? No. The gazebo hidden away at the end of the river park?
… perhaps… my room?
No! No. What nonsense! What an animal you are!
The gazebo then. Yes. The heavy drops would drum on the zinc roof, making conversation impossible. Alone and screened from the world by a silver curtain of rain, we would sit in silence… sharing the silence… holding hands… not needing conversation… no, better yet, our relationship beyond conversation…
“Would it be unreasonable of me to ask when you’re going to finish that prescription, Montjean?” Doctor Gros startled me by asking. “Or is there something beyond that window that has a prior claim on your attention?”
I muttered some apology or another and plied my pestle with unnecessary vigor.
Midafternoon the wind changed, the clouds were herded away to the west, and the sunlight returned—quite inconsiderately, it seemed to me.
The day wore on and the slanting rays of the sun had plunged the arcades on the west side of the square into deep shadow when, for the thousandth time, my attention strayed from my pharmaceutical drudgery and I looked out my window in worried anticipation. She was just passing out of the dense shadow, and her white dress seemed to burst into brightness as she walked with her exuberant stride towards the clinic, hatless, but carrying a closed parasol. My heart twisted with pleasure.
As I approached her on the square, still tugging on my linen jacket, a silly smile took possession of my face and would not release it, although I was sure every eye in the village followed my slightest gesture. She smiled too, but hers was charming where mine was inane.
There was a cafй frequented by the lady patients, as it offered a thin pallid liquid that claimed to be English tea (then quite fashionable) served with small cakes which, as they were dry and tasteless, were assumed to be quintessentially British. I suggested that we take some refreshment there, after her long walk.
“Exactly four thousand two hundred thirty-three paces, from my door to this spot,” she specified.
“Exactly?” I asked in a tone of bantering admonishment.
She shrugged. “For all I know, it might be. Frankly, I wouldn’t care to sit among the ladies and nibble at biscuits. May I have a citron pressй somewhere were we can sit in the sun?”
“Of course. In fact my mood is so expansive that I might even offer you two citrons pressйs.”
I am sure it was not just my imagination that the pairs of ladies strolling the square or sitting at the “English” cafй glanced rather often in the direction of our table, then looked away with studied indifference as they exchanged brief comments. And I felt there was a tone of insinuation, if not downright collaboration, in the excessive graciousness with which our waiter served us. But my annoyance at these intruders evaporated in the pleasure I took in our conversation, which might have appeared to an eavesdropping stranger to be banal and commonplace, but which seemed to me to be filled with significant things unsaid, meaningful gestures withheld, touching intimacies unexpressed. I asked after her brother, her father, and her ghost, all of whom, it appeared, were thriving—although that may not be the mot juste in the case of a ghost. Every moment after the first quarter hour I dreaded that she would say it was time for her to return home. But she seemed perfectly content to sit, sipping her citron pressй, while drawing me out with questions about the deprivations of my youth, my struggle for an education, my medical and literary aspirations. I spoke almost without pause for the better part of an hour, coming to the conclusion, in my youthful egoism, that she was a delightful and entertaining conversationalist.
“It’s fascinating,” she said. “I’ve never known anyone so concerned with the future as you. My father lives in the distant past, and my brother and I have always lived from moment to moment, or at most from day to day. We never talk about the future. I suppose I have always thought of the future as a great heap of tomorrows each waiting its turn to become today.”
“How then do you make plans?”
“Plans? We don’t. That is… we don’t plan in the sense that we seek to achieve things, or become something. We do, of course, try our best to avoid embarrassments… difficulties.”
“Difficulties of what kind?”
She looked at me over the rim of her glass. “Oh, of all kinds.”
“Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with your brother.”
“I was not aware there was anything wrong with Paul.”
“Maybe if he had met a few difficulties along the way, he wouldn’t be so bored with life, so superior in his attitudes.”
“Aren’t you being a bit of a snob?”
“Me? A snob?”
“Not everyone has had a life of struggle to exercise him and make him strong. Not everyone is free to make a career, to anticipate a future.” Her smile was tinged with a sadness that drew my tenderest feelings towards her. Then, with a faint shift in the corners of her eyes, the smile became a look of serious examination as she searched the features of my face one by one in a way that quite discomfited me. “Dr. Montjean, are you aware that you are handsome?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Most handsome men know it only too well, and their confident posturing is a nuisance. But you don’t seem to be aware of your beauty. It’s an attractive ignorance.”