As we progressed farther up towards the mountains, Katya lifted her face to the sun and breathed deeply and slowly, her eyes half-closed. Paul, on the other hand, seemed to sit tensely on the seat beside me, as though unwilling to relax, as he looked out on the countryside with distaste and mistrust at all this raw nature that was being inflicted on him.
“May I inquire as to our destination?” he asked.
“Alos?” I responded. “Oh, it’s just a little agricultural village. Quite humble. Typically Basque.”
“I hadn’t noticed that humility was typical of the Basque,” he said, letting his eyes settle lazily on me. “Not that they lack every justification for being humble. And how far away is this humble little Basque agricultural village?”
“Nine or ten kilometers as the crow flies.”
“And how far, if the crow has chosen to ride in the back seat of a cart lurching over an uneven dirt road?”
“Oh, about twice that, I should estimate.”
“I see. Twenty kilometers of unrelieved natural beauty attacking us from all sides. How wonderful.”
Katya laughed and turned to us. “Don’t despair, Paul. We’ll break our journey with a lovely picnic.”
“Oh, Good Lord, yes, the picnic! How could I have forgotten the picnic? Is there no end to these pastoral delights? I shall have to protect myself from this glut of pleasure, lest my senses be irremediably cloyed. And have you chosen a suitable site for our jolly picnic?”
“Of course not! It’s an adventure, Paul. One cannot organize an adventure any more than one can rehearse spontaneity. We shall simply go along until we find the perfect spot, and there we shall stop.”
“I see. And how shall we recognize this perfect spot?”
“It will be where we stop.”
Paul turned to me and blinked several times in accurate imitation of his father’s expression when bewildered.
I shrugged. “It makes perfect sense to me.”
“Hm-m. I sense a conspiracy. Very well, sister dear, I accept your notion of an adventure. But I do hope your perfect spot comes along soon. The sooner this feast begins, the sooner it will be done. And it’s always been my philosophy that anything worth doing is worth doing quickly and shoddily. A man must have some rules to live by.”
I laughed. “Oh come now, Paul. Sit back and let all this nature and beauty seep into your soul. Become one with the universe.”
Paul shuddered at the very thought. “It was God’s design to keep Man and Nature apart. It is for this reason that, on the Eighth Day, He said: Let there be windows, doors, shutters, and curtains. And it was so. And He pronounced it good.”
In re-creating this conversation, I seek to make concrete an ineffable tone that permeated the whole afternoon, a tone of hollow humor and impotent camaraderie. Our words had the energy and inflections of entertainment, but the jokes were feeble, maladroit, forced. Each of us sought to keep the outing light and amusing for the sake of the others while, just beneath the surface, our attentions were on troublesome and saddening things. Generous though our motives were, there was something pitifully inept in our execution.
The road followed the Gave de Salies that wended, now close beside our wheels and sparkling in the sunlight, now a field away and calm, now hidden in a curve of trees; and it was when we had rounded a turning that revealed two graceful bows of the river beyond and below us that Katya decided we had arrived at the perfect picnic site.
Monsieur Treville assumed his responsibilities as paterfamilias and supervised the unloading and setting out of our meal, giving instructions and assignments always a moment after the task had been already undertaken, and making suggestions that were light-heartedly ignored. When satisfied that everything had been done as he had directed, he rubbed his hands together and announced that he was famished and that those who were unwilling to dig in with conviction and a certain sense of territorial aggression would doubtless go hungry.
As it happened, he ate quite lightly, often drifting off into his private thoughts as he sat rather uncomfortably on the sheet that was our ground cloth and stared, unseeing, out over the vista. In organizing everything with such superfluous energy, he, too, had been playing his part in confecting a tone of fun and animation.
To our general amusement, Paul pursued his role of the comic complainer, grousing about everything bitterly and assuring us that the basic raison d’кtre for landscape painting was to offer mankind the beauties of nature without requiring one to come into actual physical contact with its obscene reality. Furthermore, and more to the point, Katya had forgotten the salt!
The sheet was littered with the flotsam of the picnic and we had passed a quarter of an hour in relative silence, Katya leaning back on her elbows, her eyes closed, allowing the sunlight and breeze to touch her uplifted face, Monsieur Treville off somewhere in the maze of his thoughts, Paul flat on his back, his hat over his face as protection against the one fly that had attended the repast and had, of course, selected him as its host, and me lost in rehearsal of what I wanted to say to Paul. Katya rose and suggested we go down to the riverbank to collect wildflowers. Paul muttered sleepily that he would rather be struck by lightning, and I claimed to be too contented and lazy; so it was Monsieur Treville who grunted to his feet and trudged along after Katya, explaining to her that many wildflowers—golden-seal, henbane, foxglove, mayflower, among others—that are considered poisonous today, were used medicinally in the Middle Ages. Indeed, there was some reason to believe that….
And they departed, Katya moving gracefully through the tall grasses, the wind billowing her white dress; and her father following along behind, continuing his unheeded monologue. I watched them until they were lost among the trees bordering the Gave.
“She loves nature so,” I said quietly to Paul. “I admire—perhaps I envy—the way she embraces life and draws pleasure from simple things.”
“Hm-m-m,” he grunted noncommittally from beneath his hat.
“It seems a great pity, when happiness for her is compounded of such simple things as freedom and love, that she should be denied it… surrounded by such darkness and fear.”
He pointedly kept silent.
“May I discuss something with you, Paul?”
“If you must,” he muttered.
In the most succinct way possible, I told him what I had learned about the tragic event in Paris that had precipitated their flight to Salies. Then I made my case for their not running away from the evil tongues of rumormongers, as gossip would pursue them wherever they went, and they would lose years of their lives in futile efforts to elude the ineluctable.
He heard me out and was silent for a time. As he had not removed his straw boater from his face, I could read nothing of his expression. He drew a long sigh. “Montjean… what a nuisance you have been, rooting about in our past and lumbering me with your unwanted and worthless advice.”
“I have not been rooting about in your affairs. And I don’t consider my advice to be worthless… not for Katya, at any event.”
He lifted the hat from his face and opened his eyes to look at me with an expression of fatigue and condescending pity. “You are making judgments from the dangerous position of one who knows a little… but not enough. I intend to flesh out your knowledge, because learning the facts is not going to be a pleasant experience for you, and I believe you have earned a little unpleasantness. First tell me what you presume happened in Paris.”
“What happened? Well… I assume the events were as your father presented them—an accidental shooting of a young man whom he took to be a burglar.”
Paul settled his eyes on me, his expression flat. “And what if the shooting were not accidental?”
“Not accidental?”
“What if Father had known perfectly well that the young man was not a burglar?”