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Daniil took the night-train back to Berlin. The isolation of nocturnal travel led him to broodsome introspection, though he ought to have been heartened from this visit to Paris.
Alexander had so warmly embraced him in greeting and parting; his sanguine disposition undeterred, if his hair a little for the grayer. There was as much commiseration as laughter-dappled discussions on café terraces and wandering admiring through various museums; contemplative meanderings about the Luxembourg Gardens before jostling crowds descended. Alexander was certainly not perfectly happy, but Daniil did not believe this available to the mortal man—what mattered was that he was well, and gainfully employed, and that he forgave him.
Thus his visit to France had been, for all intents, sickly idyllic. Had even strengthened his brain’s sotto voce objections to Daniil’s dismissal of his colleagues’ kindly words, believing only what harsh sentiment he read or read into their correspondences; its insistences to instead trust that they lay no blame upon him. Yet mawkish Paris forced Daniil confront the country-miles which kept him from his confidants, his home country, though Daniil endeavored not to mourn one who would not receive him.
How he wished Victor were with him, a quiet but benevolent presence in his compartment.
Victor, so close a companion some thought the pair lovers. Such presumptions should have ruffled Daniil, ever wary about the perceptions of his affiliations with men of higher stations and years—no matter the decorum between them, he oft caught underbreath accusations which accompanied his quick-acquired acumen, which cast Daniil as a cherished delicatus of this or that unprincipled but entirely generous emeritus.
Daniil beheld his fatigued face, reflected in the train-window, as lonesome longing nestled against him on the compartment seat.
He had gone all his life, he believed, never having been in love; whatever chance paramour or affair he half-heartedly engaged. Indeed Daniil rather dismissed the amorous and erotic from his concern on his ambition’s account, and for this he was no more the miserable—perhaps even less the miserable, if the sighing swooning poets were sound indication.
But Victor—Victor had loved to his supposed last that queen across the chessboard, poised triumphant at his left; who had skimmed her fingertips across the stars, if not strung each from her fingertips; of whom every townsperson’s remembrance seemed odes to inimitable august brilliance and beauty; whom Victor, by the Kains’ metempsychotic mechanics, embraced within him as his own soul: she nourished with his blood and bound by his every artery, vein, and tendon.
Nina Kaina, Victor’s wife, Maria’s mother—he had married her, had children with her.
Nausea clawed down Daniil’s abdominal walls—envy and resentment exacting a psychosomatic emetic effect upon his nerve-circuits. Daniil was almost amused that he was well and truly lovesick; but perhaps the dining-car dinner had simply not particularly agreed with him.
The train halted. Daniil hastened from the station to catch a tram to his and Victor’s flat; little surprised to find its lights yet illumined.
Victor sat at the antique pedestal desk, head upon arms crossed atop his open journal in seeming sleep. His woolen suit-coat pooled on worn hardwood behind him, presumably having slipped off the chairback. Affection laced in lovelorn pain stifled Daniil’s rational thought, that he recovered that coat, draped dark fabric over Victor’s shoulders.
Daniil looked on him a moment. What he would not give to kiss Victor’s cheek, fix his hair evidently disheveled by fretful fingers; just what was on his mind to so agitate him? What fascination or theorem so seized the intellect of this man whose house had found how to perform miracles; whose hand too had touched the scattered heavens.
The floorboards reported Daniil’s retreating footstep. Victor’s eyes slowly opened.
“Daniil?”
“Victor! Ah, I— I, I was going to wake you, but I figured I should let you sleep, and it does get drafty in this room at night—the cold might disturb you.” Daniil cleared his throat. “You should go to bed. If you’re falling asleep, that means you need sleep, and this is my opinion as a doctor.”
Victor blinked at these pronouncements, apparently not fully lucid as he straightened, holding his suit-coat in place. He flattened his hair in a manner which much offended Daniil’s aesthetic sensibilities, yet somehow Daniil still found him immeasurably charming. Victor consulted the clock.
“Pardon my slovenliness. I got carried away in recollection, I suppose.”
“Victor, you live here,” Daniil pointed out. “But you are not the only one.”
“I imagine so.” Victor closed his journal. “How were your travels?”
“Very pleasant, though I do wish you had agreed to join me. Alexander was so intent on hearing about your… family arts, and I hardly felt I could give an apt summation.”
“Forgive my disappointing him. I was unsure whether he would be receptively to such theories, much less interested. I also thought my presence may…” Victor considered his words. “I have the impression, which is perhaps just presumption, that you are still not particularly inclined to forgive yourself. I thought some distance from any reminders of that failure would help alleviate this.”
“You are not a reminder of my failure, Victor. You are my—” he caught himself, “flatmate.”
“Ah. I had hoped you through of me as an intimate confidant.”
“I, I do,” Daniil insisted. “Were you joking? I absolutely cannot tell with you.”
“I was.”
“Well, if you would be so kind as to hold off on further attempts at humor…”
“You have my word,” Victor assured him.
“How good of you,” Daniil drawled. “But, in all seriousness, there is something I wanted to ask you. Just something I had on my mind, on the train.” Victor nodded. “Why did you accompany me, Victor? Into exile, that is. Why not stay in the Capital?”
“I wanted to see that you got settled,” Victor said. “It seemed the least I could do. As I said, I was not inclined to let you weather whatever you might suffer alone, when you attempted to help us in our hardship. And, more simply, you are a very brilliant man, and I am fond of your company.”
Daniil felt his face warm.
“Thank you. You are a kind man,” he said. “I— I never have thanked you. For your encouragement, or your assistance, so, thank you. And I do want you to know: you are not a… dreadful reminder of some sort. Far from it. You are very dear to me.”
Victor smiled slightly, a little softer for the hour. Daniil’s chest hurt—he was so handsome.
“Victor, I…”
“What is it?”
“I— Nothing. Nothing. I… lost my train of thought.” Daniil grasped his valise. “Goodnight, Victor.”
“Wait, Daniil,” Victor murmured. Daniil disdained his hoping, his foolish hoping Victor might whisper those words Daniil had no courage to give breath. “Thank you. Sincerely, that means very much to me.”
Daniil nodded and all but fled the scene in a bout of neurosis.
He closed his bedroom door, tossed aside his valise. Buried his head in his hands, slumped down the door. Longing pangs wracked all the body Daniil so yearned for Victor to hold, his inmost viscera aching with all its besotted blood to love and be loved by Victor Kain.
The tram rattled along to Nollendorfplatz.
Victor consulted his journal, quotidian prose penned with a historian’s attention; passed the pages since September prior. As much as his contemporaries professed the historical dialectic, Victor yet maintained history possessed a cyclical rather than linear course. Evident in this most minor of matters—watched as in flashing faded film-reel Bachelor and Doctor become Dankovsky to the delicate syllabic palisades of Daniil; as once her name waned from appropriate patronymic to familiar Nina and, in moments of profoundest affection, Ninusha.
Victor had reread many an entry during Daniil’s sojourn in France. An apparent attempt to alleviate the pangs of Daniil’s absence with approximations of his discourses and intimacy; all to which Victor had become so accustomed since the pair departed his hometown.
A day Victor felt he recounted in excessive fancy, so brilliant with possibility: the dawn light and sweet beneath skies resembling Rococo frescoes. Daniil’s eyes distant and bloodshot as he lit his third cigarette, paced the platform and glared down black tracks for the train which drew them west. Through steppe-sward and half-harvested cropland; withdrawn towns and animate cities host to nights whose insomnia was little alleviated by watered-down tea come dawn. Passports changing hands, signatures in Latin script dried down on border documents.
Daniil’s colleagues abroad fitted him in snugly in a position at the university hospital quite immediately, courtesy of Daniil’s proficient German and the administration’s ostensible sympathies to his circumstances—more likely a vested interest in foreign talent.
The institution’s association with the Russian Academic Group led the pair to Nollendorfplatzer cafés. Those frequented by literati beckoned abroad by publishing prospects, possessed of interest in but little mind for science. Many flocked about Daniil, shook his hands over introductions bedecked with sincerest recognition and appreciation for his contributions to medicine. Daniil refused to engage such discussion, much to slipping smiles and disappointed countenances; at times so hostile to such acknowledgement that Victor felt obliged to apologize.
Victor’s minimal German and discretion with his funds—though the favorable conversion of roubles to marks helped alleviate financial obstacle—precluded him pursue university study; he instead engaged industrious language practice and adopted a position as editor for two literary-history émigré journals.
Despite his patient disposition, Victor anticipated frustration at such constraints; he had not, however, appreciated his exhaustion’s acuity. Whether the immediate aftermath of so long holding Nina’s Memory within him, or gradually accrued fatigue from acting as his family’s liaison, an uncommonly languid mood attended Victor’s first months abroad; he then prone to sleep through dawn and even, on occasion, during midday.
He was accordingly amenable to more modest efforts until his energies were replenished and German much improved: since mid-summer, Victor worked as a researcher in history of medicine and natural sciences at the university; a position for which a publishing-firm acquaintance recommended him.
The tram halted at the platz. Intemperate excitement arisen from love-fever conducted Victor’s heart in eagerest allegro vivace.
For Daniil inspired Victor’s soul as the lungs bestow breath upon blood, which must be the soul, if soul be the body’s essence—so his spirit acted upon his heart, which throbbed in thought of awaking to Daniil the night prior. Daniil laying his suit-coat along his shoulders, speaking such sincere appreciation and affections that when he so tentatively uttered his name Victor thought, for an instant, he might confess his own sore longing.
A notion certain spun of fever-delirium—Victor dismissed the thought and stepped lively to the café.
The much-polished mahogany walls would have presented a dour impression, if not for amiable illumination from milk-glass globes set into brass-armed fixtures; likewise the lively talk intermittently accented with laughter. Daniil sat across the café, framed in profile before the eastward window, his lovely face now more pleasantly fatigued than haggard; animated as he conversed with friends from the Russian Doctors Society.
He had kept the seat beside him unoccupied for Victor, even already ordered his tea; which Victor imbibed amidst Daniil’s discussion concerning his present inquiries. Victor noticed Daniil’s continued habit of glancing at him after speaking, as if wanting to see Victor’s reaction to quip and Q.E.D. alike first. Victor accepted the excuse to catch his cleverest eye.
The talk at their and surrounding tables presently quieted as some young homme du monde trotted onto the modest stage to present his verse.
Victor glanced at Daniil as he listened. Daniil returned this glance, as if in case Victor intended to entrust some confidence to his inclined ear. Victor looked away. Prayed neither Daniil nor any among the gathered physicians noticed him redden when Daniil—inadvertently, presumably—rested his knee against his.
Daniil spoke of no love or longings, but Victor rather doubted he would divulge such matters to him.
His idle mind found work wondering after Alexander off in Paris; Thanatica’s pathological chemist with whom Daniil had attended university. So fervent and wistful were Daniil’s praises of him, Victor questioned whether some romance once passed between the pair. This unfounded and indecorous as Victor’s inadvertent speculation when Daniil returned late—that he had not been laboring in laboratory or hospital-ward, but patronizing the infamous cafés and cabarets of this foreign capital disdained as a Prussian Sodom and Gomorrah; taking such disparagement in stride among all the many handsome learned men around him.
Victor sipped tea whose aromatic warmth scarcely soothed his chest-aches. Aspirant anatomist as he was, Victor part diagnosed the pain as perceived disloyalty to his beloved wife, though he well knew her heart would not be burned—its primary etiology was the fever-pangs of his own; which, conducting his soul’s comings and goings about his body, so loved Daniil Dankovsky.
But Victor would not burden Daniil with likely untimely affections when he had at last started to settle.
Victor would be convalescent in time—passions are capricious as Fortune; pass certain as fevers break. Certain some broken only in death, and Victor’s mind did so enjoy to go behind his back picturing what sort of little death love inclines itself; distasteful as his preemptive resentment over Daniil’s hypothetical lovers.
Daniil leaned over to Victor when polite applause for the poet commenced.
“Could we go?” he whispered. “I had a long day… I’m not in the mood for poetry.”
“Is anything the matter?” Victor whispered in kind.
“Simply tired.”
Victor suspected this a lie-by-omission, but did not ask after greater detail; only stood and quitted the café close at Daniil’s side.
Daniil glared at the darkened ceiling, tormented with thought of that wretched town. Near a year gone, yet he was denied the comfort of forgetting; of time-mottled moth-eaten memory—the miracle’s damnation which so sealed his own still livid in mind. The mirror-tower toppled to blood-imbrued earth whence it strained for the empyrean as Daniil lain awake in the Stillwater, beckoning caresses grazing his face; selfsame as those which so long enticed Eva.
Yet he awoke come morning, thought first of Victor’s words from his farewell letter: I see no better man to confide in than yourself; once more crossed the Crucible’s threshold.
“I wish I had kept better records; or rather, kept them external to Thanatica. I suppose I didn’t think they would treat the place as Persepolis.”
“You could not have predicated the outcome,” Victor said. “Your studies were cited in other articles—perhaps not enough to recreate your experiments, I concede, but your work is not entirely lost.”
“If that work is not censored or burned.”
“We have copies in our archives,” Victor said. “You must not capitulate.”
“‘Capitulate’ implies I still have a fighting chance… You are too much a dreamer, Victor.”
“I’m not a blind optimist. The Powers That Be are a peripheral, and manageable, obstacle to your true adversary—one who remains very much in your sight. Thus I implore you: no matter how seductive pessimism, do not waste your promise on defeatism. I operated under the impression that you were not disposed to the latter, but perhaps that perception was incorrect.”
“You are often uncommonly astute, but…” Daniil stared at his hands. “There were not a few instances I was convinced I should shoot myself. I have my father’s old pistol… Perhaps I kept it so close expressly for that purpose.” Grief weathered Daniil’s words to whispers. “I was convinced I couldn’t live with the disgrace, my failure to those I promised to protect…”
“Are you certain everyone will be implicated?”
“Nothing is certain, I suppose. According to his correspondences, only Alexander and myself face exile—he’s a better bureaucrat than me, and works quickly—ensured our other associates face only some unpleasant but manageable suspensions, and undoubtedly close surveillance… Closer, that is, than what I imagine we had previously been under.” Daniil took his head in his hands. “Damn it… He told me, Alexander told me not to engage with this…I should have listened. What a damned fool I was.”
“And what other course would you have taken? Simply left us for dead?” Victor countered. “I’m sure you are well aware that your colleagues understood the risk they assumed.”
“Yes, but perhaps part of that risk-calculus was complete confidence in my protection,” Daniil argued. “But you have no need to talk me down—I assure you, I came to my senses… I know suicide would do nothing on their behalf. It was just… pitiable fantasy—a last act of control, triumph over my detractors and those who waged war against my work. Perhaps some remnant of my faith dissuaded me, too.”
Victor inclined his head that Daniil elaborate.
“I never was an exemplary believer, but… I follow doctrine insofar that suicide is to disavow the privilege of living—if not precisely God’s gift; and I had some… strange, lingering fear to violate a divine commandment.” Daniil steadied himself with a sigh, straightened in his chair. “Consequently, as for my future, I received a letter from a few colleagues abroad. They offered me something of asylum, and to pull strings at a university hospital, so I can continue my research.”
“May I accompany you?” Victor asked after a moment’s hesitation.
Daniil blinked at him. “You… want to come with me?”
Victor nodded. “As you once told me: I won’t abandon you in distress.”
Daniil’s heart was yet left alight with affection for Victor’s words, though they were his own.
He rose from bedclothes unkempt from restlessness, crept down the drafty hall—his lids and limbs leaden, but brain too agitated for sleep. Daniil slid his much-annotated edition of Seneca’s work from the rather shabby bookshelf, slumped in one of two armchairs framing the window, and willed himself find succor within.
“Daniil?”
Daniil turned his head. Victor stood in the hall, yet dressed in day-clothes; likely he had been absorbed with this or that pursuit and not noticed night deepen.
“I didn’t mean to startle you.” Victor sat facing Daniil. “You couldn’t sleep, I presume.”
“It will be a year, in a week.”
“Did it comfort you any? The Consolation?”
“Clever Victor, you know my preoccupations exactly.” Daniil’s fingers worried at worn page-edges. “You believe in immortal souls. Do you suppose, as he says, that a soul can never suffer exile?” Daniil scoffed quietly. “But perhaps you think the soul, by virtue of being within a body, is in exile from—what was Georgiy said? ‘A better world than ours’?”
“Indeed I did, once. I conceive it a little differently now, but you might find such intricacies beside the point… So long as one is alive, no, I do not agree with this assertion.”
Daniil nodded.
“I remember Georgiy described reproducing a soul as analogous to music. Very Pythagorean,” he mused. “I sometimes believed in the soul when I was absorbed in music; at the opera, some orchestra… The only other time I felt such… transcendence, I suppose it is, was when I visited the country, saw the stars; so perhaps I could credit the soul’s source is the heavens, but what does that matter? Or if my soul is not ‘truly’ in exile? I still very much am, as is Alexander, and this is my issue with philosophy. Thought-provoking, but empty of much but niceties when put against actual consequences.”
Daniil closed the slim volume.
“But enough of me monologuing… Why did you think to the contrary before?”
“Simply, I was little initiated in the family studies in my youth, and quite inclined to philosophy of Plato and Plotinus’ progeny… That the only good of the body is its mortification, and Love a strictly intellectual matter; an impetus to satisfy the soul’s pursuit of true knowledge, and ensure it immortality free from the earthly; I even found some sensibility in the Fëdorovan conviction of the abject suffering sexuality perpetuated.”
“Well, I see you forwent that conviction. Twice.” Daniil cleared his throat. “Pardon me. That was not appropriate.”
“Indeed, those conceits did not quite endure into adulthood… Theory does so often fall apart in practice.”
“And what changed your mind?”
“My anatomical studies, in part,” Victor said. “I developed something of an appreciation for the body which caused a dissonance with my prior conviction.”
“I understand completely. It’s just plain tedium, how much classical philosophers disdain the body, especially as concerns desire… I feel many undermine how cerebral a thing it is.”
“Do you find desire a very cerebral thing?”
“No less so than love. Though, I always was rather attracted to those whose looks are rivalled only by their intelligence… but perhaps you find such subjects unsavory. I wouldn’t want to make you blush.”
“I am not so easily scandalized. I’m not the naïve young man I once was.”
“No…” Daniil said. “But what was the other part?”
Victor was quiet a moment. “I fell in love.”
Noxious enviousness twisted Daniil’s innards at so simple his statement, so simple a profession of his love for Nina Lilich, spoken with such enduring warmth for her.
“And yet you still believe in the soul.”
“I do. Perhaps all the more.”
“You must, if I well comprehend how you hold on to soulstates.” Daniil faced the window, the room too dim for reflection upon its surface. “I… I still dream of it,” he whispered. “The Polyhedron.”
“As do I.” Victor’s whisper drifted as soft.
“It was her, wasn’t it?” Daniil asked. “Who made it possible for the children to inhabit their dreamworlds and fantasy lands? Revisit favorite dreams, hold on to all the that’s fleeting in life? Andrey said she was the one who looked into it last, as it were… Was it her who let me see what others didn’t? That is, your son did say it was remarkable—for my age, I presume—what I saw.”
Victor frowned at Daniil’s tone; choleric for all his wistful countenance. “Do you disparage her?”
“I envy her,” Daniil breathed. “Much as I envy the Stamatins, perhaps even more, when she was the soul of a Focus.”
“I wasn’t under the impression that was something you desired.”
“I don’t. I have no interest in being imprisoned in a mirror-tower; I think my soul is perfectly comfortable where it is, if indeed it exists. It’s that she achieved the miraculous. She did what I could not.”
Daniil wondered whether Nina, by her scattered refracted psyche, had granted her dear husband access to his dearest dreams and memories, but did not pursue such inquiry—a rather emphatic aversion to further testimony about Victor and Nina’s transcendental love cast his curiosity aside.
“You need not envy her, nor position her as your opponent,” Victor said. “You may be somewhat modest, but your associates are not—I know what progress you have made in recent months. What Nina accomplished is not an achievement to best; rather a step in a trajectory to humanity at last conquering death in flesh and blood, imperfect though the analogy is.”
“That may be, but perhaps I was not completely honest about why I envy her.”
Victor inclined his head, but Daniil did not elaborate.
“But is the soul even immortal to you?” he asked instead. “Peter told me the Polyhedron holds only a ‘mere echo’ of a soul. A reflection. He compared himself to a magician, which suggests some illusion; and Andrey’s comments led me to speculate that the Polyhedron was a tomb; as if Simon took the conflation between sôma and sêma quite literally.”
“The soul is, by nature, immortal, but memory is not. That is beside the point—the reason for this seeming incongruence is that the soul is quite attached to the earthly body, and will not easily inhabit another; hence our successes with Focus were previously largely confined to the body—that is the method our family perfected, for all its flaws.”
“Ergo your interest in my work?” Daniil asked. “Though, I notice you still haven’t taken up any studies, as I thought you wanted.”
“A consequence of my linguistic deficiencies; and I was admittedly unaware as to the depth of my fatigue,” Victor said. “But, my mind has been sufficiently refreshed as of late. I’ll return to my original pursuit soon enough, and once I have, we must find some proper convergence between our sciences. If you are amenable, of course.”
“I am more amenable than I believe you can imagine, my dear Victor.”
Victor almost smiled at the address. “I’ve yet to have you doubt my imaginative faculties. Do you not often accuse me of indulging them in excess?”
“Perhaps.” Daniil too smiled a little. “Thank you for lifting my spirits. If you pardon the pun.”
“Are you all right?”
“Homesick, that’s all. Nothing some work can’t distract from. I have plenty to do: I wanted to draft an article for a scientific journal, and was asked to present a guest lecture at the Scientific Institute, I had yet to write that, either.”
Victor brewed an Assam cardamom blend of which he found himself fond in autumn; placed a soft-steaming cup beside Daniil, who gave a hushed thanks. Victor retired to the sofa with some leisure-reading after an attempt to complete some notes—at the first pen-stroke, his overtired hand and wrist quite immediately informed him he would not be pursuing this course of action. The hour was too idle for diligence anyhow, better suited to repose in Daniil’s company. Midnight made its entrance and exit unobserved by either, though the hour brought with it first October.
Daniil glanced toward Victor. “Are you injured? You keep touching your shoulder.”
“Simply stiff from writing all day.”
Daniil turned in the desk-chair. “Might I assist? I’ve picked up quite a few useful techniques over my years.”
Against his better judgment, Victor nodded.
Daniil settled beside Victor and took his hand. Victor reddened in embarrassment at how this so innocuous touch roused his nerves; but perhaps it could not be helped, when since Nina’s death no other hand had lain upon his skin.
“Relax your hand.”
Victor obliged, and the soul bound within him ached from affection all down his branching bloodways; flushed in longing the muscle eased under Daniil’s hands, that it might touch the object of its love. His veins thus made lovelines, gentle roused from dreamless dozing whose oblivion led Victor to forget what it was to have someone thus attend him, to allow another hold the body which he every day carried to weariness—that Victor then understood how much he had missed being touched; how much he missed being loved as the soul’s for the body.
“How are your shoulders?”
“Also ailing, I admit.”
“May I?”
Victor wished he did not nod, Daniil’s hands so warm through his shirt’s linen. Victor closed his eyes.
No, even in his love-fever, he failed to fathom his soul’s soundings—how he missed adoring hands upon his body, for another to soft elicit pleasure from him; which once felt intolerably intimate an act, for one to incite flesh he himself never cared to inquire after; that when first he brought even Nina to bed disquiet near numbed his nerves; that no matter how sensitive the skin her hands grazed, no matter how sensuous her caress, her touch provoked as much erotic excitement as a stranger patting his arm; all to the end of embarrassed apologies Nina whisked from his lips.
Even now this remained an inimitable intimacy Victor could not endure someone not his lover, from him he so hopelessly adored. He ought to insist Daniil take his hands away.
“You’re somehow more tense than me,” Daniil remarked.
“Naturally. I was without the benefit of your technique.” Victor twitched, a treacherous tremor of the nerves.
Daniil hesitated. “Did I hurt you?”
“No. I’m simply… not much accustomed to being touched.”
“Really.” Daniil’s hands resumed their motion. “A handsome man like you?”
Victor leaned forward. “Daniil…”
“I’m sorry. Did I make you uncomfortable?”
“No, but I would rather you not touch me,” Victor said. Daniil’s hands promptly retreated. “You didn’t offend me, I only… I simply think it prudent.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Victor gathered his breath, lest it get past his lips in words better to be left unspoken; but that breath had already lent itself to his tongue: “of the nature of my feeling toward you.”
“Which are?” Daniil’s whisper caressed Victor’s ear.
Victor stared ahead in quiet so much intruded upon by those words’ phantasms it could not consciously be conceived as silence.
“Will you not say?” A dolorous overtone struck Daniil’s words discordant. “Because you still love her?”
“I do still love her,” Victor whispered. “But that isn’t why I… I’m not so articulate in such things. Certainly I… I never did believe that I might fall in love again.”
“And are you?” Daniil breathed. “Falling in love?”
“Yes, though I do not anticipate your reciprocation.”
Daniil almost scoffed. “Whatever happened to that uncommon perception of yours, Victor?”
Victor faced Daniil with a murmur of sofa-cushion. “I wouldn’t like to make an ill assumption.”
“But of course…” Daniil sighed. “You know I’m not one for poetic talk, but really, Victor, I felt like I was being eaten alive, yet I simply…” Daniil glanced aside.
“That does sound most unpleasant.” Victor took Daniil’s hand and kissed his knuckles. “I’m sorry you suffered such on my account.”
“I’ve no doubt we will find some way to make it up to one another.” Daniil lifted his fingers from Victor’s to stroke his cheek. Affection blushed his blood as Victor at once leaned into the touch, mouth and breath brushing his thumb’s inner curvature. “May I sleep with you tonight? In your bed, I mean.”
“Certainly you may,” Victor said. “I’ll be but a moment.”
Daniil lie in Victor’s bed while he dressed and washed for bed, glad for a moment alone—his heart could not catch its breath, whelmed in love-frothed blood senseless with happiness. Nestled his nose against Victor’s pillows, suffuse with his aftershave and lotion; a sort of sensual syllogism, that scent Daniil knew as him.
Victor soon quiet closed his bedroom door. Sat on the bed’s edge, caressed Daniil’s face—he asked Victor’s curative kiss. Had himself forgotten how quickly it kindled his blood, lips alighting on his neck, lifting in soft dotings to the hollow below his earlobe; Daniil’s lips so stinging in longing Victor’s lightest breath brought a rather indecorous one from his. He had not a moment for embarrassment, with his mouth’s warmth then mingled on Victor’s tongue.
The linens soon warm from enlaced limbs; Victor’s mouth more loving than Daniil’s prosaic intellect might permit him imagine. Victor near grinned at Daniil’s light sighs, soon answering in his own; a little lower and subtler, delicate and deliberate, how he whispered Daniil’s name—that he know how Victor adored him by his tongue’s every faculty. Daniil’s lips and fingertips’ hesitance soothed by how Victor’s breath and blood trembled at Daniil’s most delicate caresses, even through his nightclothes’ cotton.
Their wreathed blood-heat was kept close by soft bedclothes as each drifted off in the other’s arms, down to dreams lambent lit with memory of the Tower.
The two took a tram to Tiergartenstraße the following evening, the October air crisp and nearing on bitter. A warm aroma of woodsmoke played in counterpoint, its source a vendor roasting chestnuts before the entrance. Daniil procured some for a handful of marks before accompanying Victor onto auburn-dappled paths.
Daniil adored listening to Victor in their ramblings, presented loose threads of various conjectures that Victor might tie each off with his acute intellect, such discourses whisked this way and that between lighthearted anecdotes. The pair shared the chestnuts, which kept close an affable warmth; offered this to hands bared only to shell the little morsels roasted to perfect tenderness, a piquant savor from the fire enriching their generous sweetness.
Victor paused beside the satin-placid pond. Poplars flushed in young autumn romance embraced the banks, flecked with fallen leaves gone to a ghostly palor. Day’s last loveliest light enkindled their uppermost leaves; the pond’s surface blushed crimson upon seeing such beauty and brilliance above. Victor looked out over the water in thought, idly lit a cigarette. Daniil accepted an offered one, briefly caught Victor’s eye with a little smile as Victor likewise lit his; extinguished the match with a little flourish of his wrist and nudged Daniil’s chin in affection.
Daniil glanced about, saw the two stood alone. “May I kiss you?”
Victor nodded, and Daniil kissed him softly. Victor cradled his face at their parting; Daniil lowered his eyes to dampened earth.
Again Victor touched his chin. “Is anything the matter, Daniil?”
“No, not at all,” Daniil insisted, and, in haste to dispel Victor’s any worry, admitted, “it only, well… It makes me rather nervous, to look at you.”
Victor’s thumb skimmed his cold cheek. “Does it?”
“Yes,” Daniil said. “I— Because…” Because Daniil thought him so completely handsome, and because Victor beheld him with an adoration whose depth Daniil was yet hesitant to entirely accept; but he was not enough affected by weekly poetry-readings to confess such sentiments. “Well, you must admit, your eyes are a rather alarming shade.”
“Alarming…” Victor mused. “My eyes unsettle you?”
“At times. You do often appear quite intense, like you know too much—my future, my past, perhaps my thoughts… I’m joking, I’m joking. They don’t unsettle me at all. I think your eyes are very lovely.”
Daniil kissed their each inner corner, and walked on with him.
Night fell fast in the waning season, at the setting sun’s slightest enticements. Day uninclined to linger long, perfume the dusk as in summer—swift took its leave and left tawny twilight in shivers. Smoke yet redolent upon cold clear air; nestling down dove-soft in Daniil and Victor’s clothes and hair, fading to its heart-notes as they returned to their flat.
Victor awoke on a frostbitten morning. Diaphanous dawn bestowed lacelike light upon the bed, pewter sheets creased with niello shadow. Daniil lie nestled against his chest, hand arrayed over Victor’s somnolent heart. Draping an arm around Daniil’s shoulders, Victor ran fine ebon strands yet aromatic with smoke between his fingers; left light kisses along his temple. Aftershave sweetly stung his lips when he kissed Daniil’s cheek.
“Good morning,” Daniil murmured.
Victor kissed his forehead. “And to you.”
The sheets susurrated as with Zephyrus’ breath as Victor rose, went to dispense with his morning ablutions and idle away the morning in Daniil’s embrace. Victor whispered a somewhat amused apology when he once more embraced him; gooseflesh sprung up on Daniil’s skin at Victor’s touch, his fingertips cold from the tap.
Daniil’s hands warm along Victor’s nerves, numbed from fall chill and slumbrous blood; his touch the first impetus to excite Victor’s senses from sleep, bring his blood to brim.
Victor thought some logic to the past philosopher-poet who saw sensation as arising from the blood—its full-flushed vessels so heightened the nerves’ receptiveness. Blood certain seemed the body’s monad; nourished vein and nerve, the finest details of the body’s architecture, lines whence arise plane-figures of fascia in bas-relief beneath bared skin. Blushed under mouth and hand drawn upon nerve-ends as a metaphysician sounding notes upon the monochord; so eliciting salacious utterance amidst verse composed of the other’s name.
Victor lay languid under him, asked Daniil his patience, to pause and plainly kiss him; so utterly acquiescent were his nerves to Daniil’s caress.
And if blood be the soul, how base a thing could earthly pleasure be, when it brought that claret aloft to its beloved body’s borders—movement’s heat letting it lift from viscera to settle against skin, so those flows run nearest their love. The body’s geometries so assuring the soul’s ascent and due conversion to the heavens; to those amorous tremors which bid Daniil press his face against Victor’s throat, as he cast his head back upon furrowed pillows, chest caught with breath given in entirety to Daniil’s name.
Daniil kissed Victor’s heart, that seat of vital spirit; with arms around him felt the slowing lulls of lifts of Victor’s breath press upon his abdomen.
At length Daniil roused from euphoric stupor on pretense of preparing tea and a spot of breakfast. He looked upon Victor from the bedroom threshold, too besotted not to step back to the bedside. Victor’s arms once more received him, and Daniil lie and listened to his heart; the closest his mortal ear may know of the heavens’ ceaselessly circling symphonies.