Katia (V-The End)

(cont. from posts below)

That was pretty much the end.

“Did you talk to Pascal?” Katia asked.

“Yeah.”

“How is he?”

“Not good.”

“Oh.”

She didn’t ask me about the rent money. She probably knew. The next two weeks were awkward between us. She knew I needed the rent money and she didn’t have it. I called Philippe and he told me he’d talk to Marie about it.

I came home from school one day and she told me she’d be moving out. I felt really bad about it. But that’s because I thought she was leaving because Pascal wasn’t going to pay the rent. It was something else. Some complex story that I barely understood. She was going back to Hungary. But only for a while. She told me the reason, but I didn’t understand it. Some family problem? Some visa question that she could only take care in Budapest? In any case, she couldn’t ask me to keep the room for her. It was getting to be late November. Great, I said to myself; not only did I not get November’s rent money, I won’t get any for December, either; it’ll take me at least a few weeks to find a new flatmate.

Katia and I kissed goodbye one afternoon and that was the last I saw of her. Philippe got the November rent from Maria and I swung by his office in Saint-Michel to pick it up one afternoon. A couple of weeks later, he had a get-together at his apartment in Versailles and invited me out. I brought him a Tom Verlaine record and he served snacks and wine and there was a lot of talk among a crowd of English teachers there about American politics. Ronald Reagan had just been elected president. Sometime during the party, Philippe asked me:

“Hey, did you hear about Pascal?”

“No.”

“He died.”

“He died?” It took a second to register. “When?”

“Oh, a few weeks ago.”

“You mean, right after I talked to him?”

“I don’t know. When did you talk to him?”

“About the rent. Early November. Before I called you.”

“A little after that.”

“Did he ever get out of the hospital?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they sent him home. Maybe not.”

So that meant: Maybe I had called him while he was on his deathbed to hound him about a hundred bucks in rent for Katia.

“What about Katia?” I asked. “Does she know?”

“Oh, she knows. She’s living at his parents’ house.”

“She’s back from Hungary?”

“Did she got to Hungary?”

“That’s what she told me.”

“Maybe. I guess. I don’t know. Marie told me, but I didn’t quite understand. In any case, her visa was temporary. So now that he’s dead, she’s no longer allowed to stay. She’ll have to go back.”

Katia did go back to Hungary. But the next year, at another party, Philippe told me that she found another Frenchman in Budapest and married him and they moved back to Paris. So Katia finally got what she wanted.

Pascal and Katia were in my life for just a few weeks that fall in Paris. We had a few conversations; really, Pascal and I just exchanged just a few sentence and Katia and I a few dozen. But I’ll always remember them both. Why is that? There are people I’ve known who’ve played bigger roles in my life, but they fade into the fog of my memory, emerging only upon some prompt, when I find some trace of them somewhere, somehow. Not Katia. She’s always there. I wonder if she still has that picture of me. Maybe it’s true, what the Native American mystics believe about images captured by a camera. Maybe it's true that they steal your soul.