The Summer of Katya Read Online Free PDF

eyes had searched mine with a mixture of sincerity and amusement, the accidental touch of her hand and the feel of her waist when I had awkwardly attempted to help her down from the sulky—nothing of substance. But the particles from which love is built up are too fine to be subdivided and analyzed, just as the total of a love is too extensive to be perceived at one time and from one emotional coign of vantage. Beyond reason, beyond logic, and without knowing it, I was in love with her.
    I expressed my love with admirable restraint: I told her I would be delighted to take tea on the terrace.
    The brother rose and said that he would have to deny himself the pleasure and enlightenment of my company, as he really should go to his room and rest in hopes of inspiring Time to intercede on his behalf and cure him. He bowed to me with a slightly taunting deference as he said, “Above all, Doctor, avoid challenging my sister on any subject. If she fears she might lose a contest, she’s not above bashing you with the teapot. As for you, Katya, let me warn you that the good doctor seems to be in a rather contentious mood this afternoon. No doubt a little sensitive about his limitations as a healer of broken bodies. Well, I’m off. Do have a pleasant chat.”
    The terrace on which we sat, overlooking the dank, neglected garden, was dappled with sunlight through branches of the trees. And when the slight breezes sketched patterns of shadow over Katya’s high-necked dress of white lawn trimmed with lace at the cuffs and throat, the light striking her bodice reflected up under her firm round chin and seemed to set her face aglow. I watched, absorbed, as she served the pale tisane with gestures as graceful as they were sure and nonchalant. That ease of habit, I assumed, was a matter of breeding, just as was her brother’s indolent superiority. I was again struck by the similarities, and blessed differences, between them.
    “You live here alone… you and your brother?” I asked.
    “There is a village woman who comes.”
    “But not, presumably, a gardener.” I gestured towards the congested overgrowth before us.
    She laughed. “That’s not fair. I have toiled long hours in an effort to create an artless, even wild effect. And you don’t seem to be impressed by it.”
    “Oh, but I am impressed. You have achieved an effect that I might term… uniquely unstudied.”
    “Thank you,” she said, bowing her head in modest acceptance of the praise.
    “And your parents?” I asked. “Where are they?”
    “My mother died in childbirth… our birth.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “You’re not really, of course. How could you be? But I appreciate your conventional expression of sympathy.”
    “And your father?”
    She looked out over the garden and sipped her tisane. Then she replaced the cup in its saucer and said airily, “Oh, Father’s hale enough.”
    “He lives here with you?”
    “We live with him, actually.”
    I was somewhat surprised. If there was a father living here, how did it come to pass that Katya was dispatched on a bicycle to fetch a doctor, all the way to Salies?
    She smiled. “Well, to tell the truth, Father does not know about Paul’s little accident yet. The quotidian problems of life are quite beyond Father’s capacity to cope. No, let me say that more correctly. It’s not his capacity to cope that is in question, it’s his interest in coping. He devotes most of each day to his ‘studies.’ “ She accented the word comically in what I took to be an imitation of her father’s voice.
    “Studies of what kind?”
    “Goodness only knows. He pores over thick tomes and works at reducing them to scratchings in thin little notebooks, and every now and then he says ‘Hm-m-m’ or ‘Ah!’ or ‘I wonder?’ “ She laughed lightly. “I’m really not doing him justice. He’s a dear old thing with a passion for medieval village life and customs that absorbs his time and mind, leaving him with only the most