He lay back on the ground cloth and closed his eyes. After a time, he continued. “I cannot know if that is exactly what happened, of course, but I fancy it’s close enough. At all events, when I arrived home that night, I came upon the poor fellow. At that time, I had not yet perfected the distant sangfroid that has become so attractive an element of my character. I was frightened, confused, shocked—indeed, I experienced the whole medley of emotions appropriate to the circumstance. Unable to think clearly, I woke Katya and told her what had happened. You can imagine her state. We talked for hours… late into the night. What were we to do? It was unthinkable that we could allow Papa to go to prison or, worse yet, to an asylum. For much of the time Katya was teetering on the edge of shock. She gripped my hand until the fingernails broke my skin, and she shuddered convulsively. But she did not cry. She has never cried since, in fact.
“Not knowing what to do, we agreed to do nothing. Not until morning, at any rate. I sent Katya to bed—certainly not back to sleep—and I dragged the body into the shrubbery to conceal it until I had decided upon a plan of action.”
I sat there unmoving, unable to comprehend all that I was hearing. I remember that the sun was hot on the back of my neck, but I felt a chill of horror beneath the warm skin. The breeze turned a corner of the sheet and covered my outstretched legs. To this day, for some reason I do not understand, the image of my legs covered with the white sheet epitomizes that moment for me. Finally I was able to say, “But what options did you have? Surely your father insisted on facing up to his actions and not allowing his children to become implicated.”
“Fate delights in its little ironic twists, Montjean. Father did in fact confess, but that is not to say that he faced up to his actions. That next morning, Father remembered nothing of the matter. Nothing. It was gone from his memory. Obliterated. The man with whom I took breakfast, the man who babbled on about some minor point of medieval lore, was totally innocent, had never harmed another human being in his life, was in fact incapable of harming anyone. He remembered not a trace. Indeed, ever since that night, Father’s memory has been weak and perforated to the point of burlesque comedy, as even you must have noticed. Surely you don’t imagine that a vague and distracted mind such as he now possesses could have made him one of France’s most respected amateur scholars. Before the… accident… his mind and memory were like honed Swedish steel.”
“But, I don’t understand. If the incident was gone from his memory, how could he have confessed?”
“My dear fellow, I am nothing if not clever to the point of deviousness. I availed myself of half-truths and of all the forces of my imagination to trick him into admitting to the authorities that he had shot the young man, without subjecting him to the horror of knowing that he had killed a human being in cold blood… without making him face the fact that he was insane. First, I told him outright that the lad was dead, shot in your garden. Then I made up the tale that he had tried to force his attentions on Katya, and that, in her panic, she had shot him.”
“What?”
“Reserve your astonishment, old fellow. It gets more baroque as it goes along. I convinced Father that, in her state of shock, Katya did not have the slightest memory of killing the man. He agreed with me that it would be cruel—and possibly dangerous to her mind—to allow her to learn the terrible truth. Between us, Father and I concocted the story that he shot the young man by accident, mistaking him for an intruder. So, you see, Father confessed to killing the boy without ever knowing he had actually done it. The police accepted our story after minimal investigation.”
“Minimal?”
“We are, after all, a family of some importance. Justice may be blind, but she is not without a sense of social propriety. The poor are grilled and cross-questioned; the rich have their statements taken down, with close attention to accurate spelling.”
Paul had recounted the events with his eyes closed, lying on his back, his delivery slow and monotonic, almost bored. I wondered if this cold insouciance was a product of his unemotional character, or if it was a defense he had developed.
“And Katya?” I asked after a silence. “How did all this affect her?”
“As you would imagine. She was fond of the young man… perhaps even loved him. The fact of his death was shocking; the method of it—by her own father’s hand—was shattering. If she had also known that the shooting was no accident, that her father (or rather the madness hiding within her father’s flesh) had cold-bloodedly shot him down, I daren’t consider what effect it might have had on her. Fortunately, she never knew. So you see, to this day my family survives in a fragile web of interwoven misapprehensions. Katya believes Father shot the young man by error, and that his mental state was precariously shocked by the event. Father believes that Katya shot the fellow in panic after his attempt to violate her. And both of them are willing to do whatever is necessary—to pull up roots and go to the ends of the earth if necessary—each for the purpose of protecting the other. I hope you can appreciate how dangerous it would be for both of them if your probing were to expose them to the truth. Your blundering about in our affairs could easily tear the delicate web of lies that prevents my father and my sister from discovering the horrible and destructive truth.”
“And you sit at the center of the web. A spider-god controlling their fates.”
Paul vented a long, shuddering sigh, as though infinitely weary of me. He was silent for a time before continuing in his flat, almost indolent tone. “It would not have been a matter of the guillotine for Papa. It would have been an asylum. Have you ever experienced an asylum for the criminally insane, Montjean? Do you have any idea what they’re like?”
“As a matter of fact, I have. I did a year of internship at the Passy institution before coming to Salies.” I did not confide to Paul that my experiences at Passy had turned me away from all thoughts of pursuing my interest in the new science of psycho-analysis. I had found the treatment of the mentally ill, even at such an advanced facility as Passy, to be brutal, degrading, horrid. The nurses and attendants seemed to have been dredged up from the lowest orders of society. The case which, in my mind, italicized the horrors of institutionalization was that of a young woman I shall call Mlle M. She was young and very pretty, beneath her slovenly, indeed disgusting, faзade. The event that had driven her beyond the boundaries of reality had to do with incest. No purpose would be served in detailing it further. Mlle M. used to wander the grounds of Passy, her expression bland and distant, her soft eyes empty. The most salient manifestation of her condition was her practice of soiling herself and refusing to allow anyone to clean her up. Despite my natural disgust, I felt particular compassion for her, and after many months of gently, slowly bringing her to have confidence in me, I learned something that shocked me and filled me with rage. During her first weeks at Passy, the gentle and withdrawn Mlle M. had been subjected to frequent and rather bizarre sexual assaults on the part of guards and attendants who, as I later discovered, considered such opportunities to be one of the privileges associated with their unpopular occupations. Mlle M. confided in me with expressions of sly pride that it was to protect herself from these assaults that she had devised the practice of soiling herself and making herself too disgusting to be desirable.
With outrage and fury I reported what I had discovered to the hospital administrator, who warned me against giving credence to the distorted rantings of persons who, by definition, were adrift from reality. But he assured me that he would look into the matter.