ALREADY AS HE WALKED HOME with Nagorny, Alyosha was beset by images of Katya’s naked body—plagued by suggestive and even outright wanton visions, which would be enjoyable to a degree, but that was just it. There was no degree, no gradual anything. All he could think of was her nakedness, the dusky pink and brown of her nipples. And her thinness, her ribs and her collarbones—so different from the women he was used to seeing. She looked that much more naked, sharpened by leanness. The hair between her legs was thick, dark. It was curly and silky at the same time. He’d imagined it would be coarse in texture. How could he think about anything else when he was vulnerable to visions like that? Katya’s body, the slightly acrid smell of her hair, the birthmark—these eclipsed every other thing. He couldn’t even see Lake Baikal represented on a map without becoming aroused.
Aware that Katya was doing something illicit, that she should not, at seventeen, sit astride him and rub him so confidently, betraying this as something she’d done many times before, Alyosha knew he should feel disgusted by her. He’d been raised to find such gestures too vulgar to succeed in exciting his attention. Instead, he itched with lust. No sooner had he ejaculated than he wanted to be doing whatever would lead to that feeling again. And if Katya’s knowingness about intercourse made her a wicked girl, it also made her a powerful kind of goddess; the two coexisted. Not a deity he’d been raised to worship, that was true, but he was learning the world was big, so very big, and filled with many different kinds of women to admire, to want to see naked and hold in one’s arms. Anyway, he hadn’t time to waste on waiting for the right kind.
He had to see her again, as many times as possible. And Nagorny would have to help him. Nagorny would have to understand that this was not the kind of thing that should be denied to a person. Especially not to a person whose days were numbered—it might be all right to deny it to another boy, under other circumstances, but Alyosha wasn’t that other, theoretical boy. He was the one being shipped off to his death, one way or another. He was the one who deserved Katya.
“Nagorny,” he said. “I’d like it very much if we could do this again.”
“Visit Kolya?”
“I want to go to Kolya’s house. I want to go as often as I can. But I want … Here’s what I’m asking you, Nagy. I’m asking you to tell Father and Mother that we are going out for walks. Say it’s for strengthening my leg. I want to go whenever the weather permits.”
Nagorny looked at him.
“Please, Nagy,” he said, and Nagorny, knowing what he was being asked, agreed.
IT WAS MAGIC. The skies remained a clear sparkling blue; the temperature never dipped uncomfortably low. Reason suggested it would be difficult if not impossible to arrange even a few meetings between Alyosha and Katya, what with the presence of Katya’s family in the house as well as her father’s medical practice. But one opportunity after another presented itself. The mother had gone to the market in Medyanki Tatarskie; the father was at an old man’s deathbed; the maid, asleep. The maid had woken up and gone to help her seamstress sister, who had fallen behind in filling orders; the father had been summoned to attend to a birth in Savina; the mother, having eaten some bad meat, was ill and confined to her room. The mother had recovered and was in her garden, pulling all the weeds that had sprung up while she was ill; the father was closeted in his examining room with a difficult case; the maid had taken the carpet down to the river to wash, as it was too large to wash at home.
Handsome Alyosha, he wrote in his journal, was astonished by his good luck—it was even better than winning a bicycle race against Hermes and Chronos. He was able to be with Katya almost as often as he cared to be.
At night, lying in bed, he sorted through the details of “being a tsarevich,” as she called it, to come up with the most amusing among them.
Servants having to walk out of rooms backward so as to never turn their backs on the tsarevich.
Having a heated indoor saltwater swimming pool, so you could bathe in a summer ocean while a blizzard raged outside.
Almost anything about Tsarskoe Selo fascinated Katya, from the Chinese theater—the whole Chinese village!—to the elephant house to the pyramid and the Turkish bath. Alyosha soon learned that his part of the bargain didn’t have to be any harder than his imagining himself back at home, walking or being pushed along one of the many paths through the grounds, and narrating what he saw as he continued from one marvel to the next. She didn’t even care if they visited a place twice. In fact, she soon developed a preference for some destinations over others.
“Take me back to the Chinese village,” she’d say. “Tell me again what it looks like.”
So he’d begin with a pagoda’s roof, explaining how it was different from the roof over her head, how it wasn’t just one but one, two, three roofs stacked on top of one another, or more if you liked—as many as you liked—and the higher up the smaller they were and each had a little pointed corner, like the shoes worn by Ali Baba. And then of course he’d have to tell Katya the story of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” because the most interesting thing about Ali Baba was not how the tips of his Arabian slippers curled upward from the ground. This was how Alyosha made the walks through Tsarskoe Selo last so long, because he always digressed off the path and into a story, and at some point he realized he didn’t have to be strictly truthful. Even were Katya to grow up and marry an aristocrat—an outcome that was impossible, as aristocrats had been outlawed—she’d never visit Tsarskoe Selo. The Bolsheviks were probably burning it down even as Alyosha and Katya lay together in her bed.
But in Kubla Khan Selo, as narrated from the smallest bedroom of a physician’s house in Tobolsk, the zookeeper had just taken shipment of a team of pachyderms, and the elephant house was being rehabilitated for its new occupants. Their names were Flora and Belle, and Flora was thirty and Belle was thirty-three, and when the tsarevich came to greet them, they bowed their heads down, then laid their trunks on the ground, each asking to be the first on whom the tsarevich would tread, walking up the trunk and over the huge gray skull and into the howdah.
“What’s a howdah?”
“It’s the saddle an elephant wears, only it’s not a saddle, really, as that would look like a button on anything as enormous as an elephant. It’s a chair for as many as four people. Two face frontward and two face backward, and there’s a canopy above, to keep the heat off their heads. You can get brain fever in the jungle, if you don’t wear a hat and keep out of the sun.”
“Father said you were sick. What’s the matter with you?”
“What did he say was the matter?”
“He didn’t.”
“It’s more that I’m … that I have been ill and now am better, but my mother is a nervous woman; she likes to have physicians look in on me.”
“What was it that was the matter?” Katya asked.
“They don’t know.”
“Well, what did it feel like? Did it have a rash?”
“No. You can’t always see it. I get injured easily, that’s all.”
“Do you fall down?”
“Katya.”
“Do you?”
“Not more than anyone else. Tell me where you want to go, Katya.”
“Where were we?”
“On the roof of the pagoda.”
“Then let’s go back there, Tsarevich.”
“ ‘Let the lion dog be small,’ ” Alyosha quoted. “ ‘Let its face be black, its eyes be large and luminous, its ears like the sails of a war junk. Let it learn to bite the foreign devils instantly. Let—’ ”
“What foreign devils? What are they?”
“It’s how the Chinese refer to people who are not Chinese. Empress Dowager Cixi—she was the one who ruled until 1908—made up a sort of poem about the dogs that guard the temple.” Alyosha closed his eyes while he spoke. Imagining: he could do it, but it wasn’t second nature.