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Chapter Text

Alyosha wakes early from a recurrent dream.

Elder Zosima had been discussing labyrinths with him. As usual, Alexei Fyodorovich weeps in the dream while the Elder beseeches him to disattach from illusory concerns. If only, our hero had said, as he so often does, he'd done what Zosima had asked him the day before the latter passed away three years ago! He'd have run to see his half-brother Dmitri Fyodorovich, the eldest of his two brothers. It's the same labyrinth as always. Couldn't the calamity of the epileptic orphan-lackey Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov persuading Alyosha's volatile full brother Ivan Fyodorovich, born after Mitya to their father's second wife, to leave town so the lackey could murder the brothers' drunken father Fyodor Pavlovich and frame the manic Dmitri so cunningly, have been prevented by Alyosha's obedience to his Elder?

Such obedience was tradition!

Why had he been so deterred at the square's main restaurant by Ivan's diatribe against Jesuits and Rome, by his luring him into some kind of simulated Inquisition of the sixteenth-century Spanish Dominicans against a Christ-figure? Dmitri's manic jealousy of their father persuing Agrafena Alexandrovna (the object of his obssession), his beating Fyodor Pavlovich's face the previous day, should have been enough to compel Alyosha to prioritize their meeting. But, Ivan's mind was fracturing already at that point, and the horror of his rancor stunned the youngest Karamazov. Alyosha should have stopped him when he'd begun ranting about babies being shot in their mothers' arms! And now, years later, here in their inherited home rests the same Vanka, mind plagued by innumerable tiny fractures so impossible to trace and hope to heal. Here in the very home Smerdyakov, rumored to have been Dmitri's and Ivan's and Alexei's half-brother anyway through his mute homeless mother who'd passed post-partum, murdered the patriarchal Karamazov. A haunted home, yes, it is. But, it's one which nevertheless suits them. Also does it suit the old servants Grigory Vasilievich and Marfa Ignatievna, more like surrogate parents to the brothers Karamazov than servants.

"Love Ivan!" had brother Dmitri cried out from his passionate heart to Alyosha before the first day of his trial. How could he then, and how could he now, if Ivan won't receive it? How could so brilliant a man in the prime of his youth have become so affected? So affected by Smerdyakov's twisted logic so as to be reduced to incomprehensibility? He can barely care for himself in the most basic ways. Damn all those nihilistic ideas he brooded over for years at school! Damn the ludicrous persona he'd created around the devilish philosophy that "everything is permissible"! Where could brother Ivan have descended to during his studies, so profoundly into the empty void? By the time practical horror in the form of Smerdyakov's very nature stared him in the face, as he was gaslit to believe the lackey that he was most responsible for Fyodor Pavlovich's murder, Ivan devolved into madness.

Through the love given Alyosha by God's grace, he should be able find Ivan and with all the onions in the world pull him back to sense: that's the maxim that our hero clings go. Back to serenity, toward Christ, that's the only way out of the spider's web, out of the grip of sin and death. Mitya himself had said to Alexei with conviction, soon before his deportment to Siberia after being proclaimed guilty of parricide, in the sophism of the Paraclete: Listen, brother Ivan will surpass us all. It's for him to live, not us. He will recover.

"No amount of talking, of encouraging, of visits from friends -- Katya more than anyone! -- seems to move him enough so that his spirit revive," Alyosha wails as he kneels at the Elder's feet, "as if the Devil himself has him! Just as he claimed he saw after hearing Smerdyakov admit to killing our father! He went off the rails after such horror, after poor Smerdyakov's... suicide... Poor soul in Hades! But, my Vanya, the brother who nestled for nine months within the same sweetest tabernacle I had done so, and just four years before me -- I mean the womb of our mother, Sofia Ivanovna Karamazova, may God have mercy on her soul, may her devotion to the Mother of God bring her to full union with the Lord! -- my brother can't possibly deserve the inferno he's in!"

"He's in a labyrinth, my dear," the Elder instructs.

It isn't the first time he's said it.

"Yes, and, I've done everything to follow him, to find him," Alyosha squeezes the Elder's hands, "and just when I think I have, I face a curve, and it leads right back to the very periphery of the maze so that it seems I must begin all over again just to find another curve."

Alyosha reiterates that he won't stop trying. No matter what. Even as time passes and Ivan's threads linking him back to reality fray more and even snap altogether, there's a way to get his soul back. 

Just like there's a way to still hope for Dmitri's escape. No matter what his monthly letters read. No matter how resigned the eldest Karamazov is to his fate of dying in the katorga -- for who can endure eighteen whole years more in Siberia, while it's clear Mitya is already ill and suicidal? -- and how sincerely he writes to Alyosha about God's providence and to dearest lethargic Grusha begging her to live fully and to never cease prayers and almsgiving. No matter, there has to be a way.

"Don't think yourself immune to the tricks of Antichrist, my dearest Alexei: hadn't your instinct been to serve an eye for an eye, when your poor sensitive brother Ivan Fyodorovich asked whether you'd kill a man who'd killed a child?"

Alyosha's silvery eyes open to the dawn.

Grigory and Marfa are already awake preparing breakfast while Alyosha, washed and a little haunted, takes it upon himself to help. The youngest Karamazov always brings Ivan breakfast and happily -- at least on the surface -- helps him wash up and eat, careful not to make any mess so that the mice and the springtime ants don't begin crawling through crevices to snatch up scraps.

"Thank you both," he insists to his beloved servants, as he picks up the tray to bring to his brother.

"Oh, sir, oh sir," Marfa tutters as she tends to.

"Always, young master," Grigory assures, smiling serenely.

Alyosha gently arranges the curtains in Ivan's room so that some morning sun come in.

"Good morning, dear," he says in a breathy, cheery voice. "It's lovely out, the azaleas are in full regalia in the half-shade of the pines, and Pentecost is arriving soon; what's this you've got here, reading?"

Ivan attempts to turn his unfocused eyes to his younger brother, who, after a kiss on the forehead, turns to a book he had evidently fallen asleep reading to in the dim candlelight last night.

"Sixteenth century Spanish mystics," Alyosha laughs, reading the cover and perusing the small book, The Dark Night of the Soul by John of the Cross and in Spanish, "ah, how the instincts remember, brother, the Grand Inquisitor; I would love nothing more than to hear any thoughts you have on the persecuted Juan de la Cruz, and to know when and how you procured this book without Katya knowing."

Alyosha helps Ivan out of bed to the basin where he he gently sponges him, perfumes him, helps him clean his teeth, changes his clothes and leads him to the toilet. In the meantime, he considers what a good plan it would be today to introduce his students to John of the Cross' Spanish poetry, one the first written poems of the Iberian language. Additionally, it's excellent example of the influence the sixth-century Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite had on Western theology and philosophy. Kolya would scoff but most likely warm up to it. 

A funny memory crops up in the mind of Alyosha as he replaces the water in the love-poppies Katya's placed by Ivan's bedside: Pyotr Alexandrovich Miüsov, kinsman of Mitya's, had on that fateful day in Zosima's cell three years back argued against Fyodor Pavlovich that he'd not been the one to inform him of the legend of the first-century disciple of St. Paul's -- the original Dionysius Areopagite carrying his own severed head from the hill of Montmartre in Paris to the cemetery in which he was eventually buried. Zosima had insisted that none of this had ever occurred to any saint, certainly not one venerated in the Orthodox tradition. Alyosha had had to read through several tomes to investigate who on earth this supposed early saint had been, discovering it was a Roman Catholic legend around the Areopagite, which would certainly have chafed Zosima.

Coddling Ivan like he himself would do so to Alyosha when they were babes, which results in a kind of mild surrender on the part of the former, Alyosha reads through the poem and notices not only the influence from Pseudo-Dionysius (and, of course the original Areopagite who was St. Paul's disciple) but also an allegory to the scriptural Canticle of Canticles. In this lovely part of Scripture, the sun-scorched Bride makes her way in the quiet dead of night through Jerusalem to meet her Bridegroom in the garden on the city outskirts. Making her way by faith alone, in a labyrinth, she longs with her whole heart to meet Solomon -- better, Christ -- in the Garden of Gethsemane or even Golgotha itself where all life begins.

My dream, Alyosha thinks. My dream, and it brings me so close to the women in love with my brothers, my brothers who are so far out of the City of Peace upon their own Places of the Skull; oh Grushenka, oh Katya, how you both have wandered out in the quiet dark in search of your beloveds, just to be misguided and directed back home and scorned. Oh, sisters of mine, how Christ needs faith from you now more than ever!

"Zheltuga, Siberia," Ivan murmurs in agony, burying his face in Alyosha's shoulder. "The desolate expanse."

"Take heart, flesh of my flesh," assures Alyosha.

The youngest Karamazov his hand through Vanya's thick dark hair, a feature the middle sibling shares with Mitya and their late father before illness caused Fyodor Pavlovich's hair to whiten and whither and fall. Alexei possesses a touch more of his and Ivan's mother Sofia's fairness, more than Ivan possesses, and so his hair is more chestnut colored and his azure eyes are so pale that they seem grey. Ivan's eyes are a striking olive green and Dmitri's a lacquered ebony. Nevertheless, all three brothers' colorings are more earthy-golden than the average Russian of the area, so much that when either of them pale they turn a sort of yellow instead of blue-grey.

"Take heart in your reading," and he explains how he'll bring up the Spanish poem to his students, "the labyrinths of the heart are quite confusing for us all, and, yes, the desolate expanse of Siberia and the desert of the Early Fathers present the Christian soul with the opportunity to witness God's mystery."

Once Katerina Ivanovna arrives with warm affection and assurance, and once Alyosha describes Ivan's perusal of The Dark Night, he makes off to the gymnasium to thrill the boys with all kinds of mysterious pathways they can take for their studies in the history of the Orthodox faith and the comparisons with Rome. Though met with some loud complaints against Spain, Alyosha reigns in the students. Spaniards, he reminds, are just as proud and soldier-minded and yet kind to their poor and nationalistic as Russians, and are certainly resistant to French frivolity. 

"Imagine all they've found in the Americas, among the tribes, whether due the spiration of the Paraclete which moved them to evangelize the ignorant, or out of pure greed for gold, not so unlike us in Siberia," and something in his tone reminds his boys of all they know of Dmitri, how he could have been in Siberia gold-mining instead of slave-laboring, and how his rumored plans to escape to the United States seem like mere fantasy now that years have passed.

After class, he chats happily with Kolya, who's become his teaching assistant, and some other boys as they head home to their families and their homework.

Alyosha stops at the church to pray with Grushenka, like every day, and while the latter listens to the former she's cheered, until they together recite their litany of prayers to Christ and the Theotokos, the creeds, the supplications, the words of worship and gratitude taken from the great saints.

"Don't they reach him, Alyoshechka, sweetest heart?" Grushenka weeps, clutching at Alyosha. "I'm praying for his letter that should be arriving soon! You're close to the Savior and the Mother of God, and, you must know that my pleas reach my Mitenka!"

Alyosha reminds her with tenderness from his crying heart, that the prayers are ones of faith, ones recited so as to be at peace with God's will, to worship and adore the Lord, "and, so, the Savior does not turn his back on one so humble in her prayer, and the Theotokos begs for His mercy on us: your beloved is secured by your Christian heart, my humble sister."

Grushenka weeps, as per custom now while in church, until Alyosha coaxes her to repeat at least one prayer, perhaps another, until she's calmed. 

"Eat, rest, and let us care for you while you make up part of our family," he beseeches. "We can't lose you, too."

Once back at the house by late afternoon and Grushenka having meandered upstairs to her chamber, Grigory immediately informs the haunted Alyosha that the Miusov gentleman is here: "Pyotr Alexandrovich, the relative of that hot-headed Adelaïda, Lord have mercy on her soul," for Adalaïda had been Dmitri's mother, Fyodor Pavlovich's first wife before running from husband and son with some lover to soon after die of typhoid, and Grigory had never warmed up to her, "and he wants to discuss a serious matter with you, sir, about traveling abroad."

Alyosha frowns.

"All right. But, what of Vanya? And Katya?"

"Oh, the lady Katerina Ivanovna took leave once the Parisian, eh, gentleman decided to remain waiting for you to return, but assured Marfya Ignatievna of Master Ivan Fyodorovich's stability before departing."

Alyosha prioritizes his brother.

"Please tell Monsieur Miusov I'll attend to him in a moment;" Alyosha makes for Ivan's bedroom, "has he been offered coffee, tea, Grigory Vasilievitch? Some small meal?"

"Yes, yes, young master, he's even accepted liqueur," Grigory assures. "I'll inform him of your plan."

Alyosha rushes to Ivan.

"He's here to take you away," Ivan mutters to his full brother, lovely green eyes rimmed scarlet with agitation, hazed over by agony, "I can sense it, Lyosha."

"Why do you think so?"

Ivan merely rests back on his pillow and weeps long tears as he stares into the abyss. Alyosha gingerly directs his palm to Ivan's chest above his heart, and feels the pulse, and prays.

"I would go to the ends of the earth to find a cure for you," Alyosha swears, "but, for anything else besides that and besides a rescue attempt of Mitka, I will not leave you. Now, how was Katya today? Katerina Ivanovna, the love of your life, who comes every day to pray over you and cherish you as if you were wed together?"

"You're going to be swept away," Ivan barely breathes, eyes closed.

"Listen and believe me," Alyosha scolds.

"If it's Europe..." Ivan's breathing is shallow as the panic, the mania, the psychosis looms, "your Karamazov nature will be lured to the lush and the wine and the delights of the Mediterranean, of the Alps and the Pyrénées, of Roman ceruleans playing off the bare shoulders of voluptuous women sweltering in the sun, of Parisian pink sunsets playing off the cheeks and the cherry lips and the bosoms of mademoiselles reveling in the so-called freedoms..." he opens disturbed eyes once more, "like I was lured on that day I left for Moscow, just to forsake the old man's Chermashnya stop, which may have changed the course of the cursed fate that's befallen us..."

Vanya grips Alyosha's hand tighter than the latter thought he could manage.

"You, my pure one, you're like one of the angels visiting Lot and of whom Sodom's men demand be released to them so they may desecrate; you must know this, you must accept that your constitution inspires pederasts to imagine you the picture of their ideal catamite."

"That may be, just because we three are like the guests received by Abraham," Alyosha's tone grows solemn, fierce, "and of the three, one of whom is human, the two angels make it to Sodom, you and I, while Mitya must face his desert exile like Christ! But, this only gives me hope!"

Stronger than he'd been three years earlier, zealous with élan vital, the young man glances at his brother with his grey eyes flashing.

"I will do everything God commands me so that you return to life, to love, to Katya, to Dmitri and to me and Grusha, and to the Lord himself; I will bring home Mitya."

Alyosha bestows onto Ivan's lips the kiss of peace, murmuring what he's taken often now to telling him, that the latter must live up to his name, "Ivan" from "Ioannes," the beloved disciple to whom Christ trusted more than all twelve, the disciple to whom the Theotokos was given at Golgotha, who ran to the empty tomb quicker than St. Peter and the Magdalene, and "who saw the Apocalypse while on the isle of Patmos, and died a prophet and a martyr of the heart rather than the flesh."

Ivan kisses Alyosha's palm as though it were suffering an agonizing pain, stigmata, and weeps long silent tears.

"I love you," he chokes, "I... I want to... love God, to forgive."

In the dining hall, Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miusov does indeed relate a very odd request to Alyosha to travel to Paris, to Montmartre of the headless Dionysius the Areopagite.

"Would you believe it, Alexei Fyodorovich -- and I confess it's good to see you after these many years, especially after all that's befallen your family -- that an opportunity has presented itself for you to meet a Russian prince in the city?"

Alyosha sips his coffee.

Pyotr Alexandrovich proceeds to tell, in a condensed fashion, though at times becoming overly excited before recalling how sensitive certain topics would seem to Alexei Karamazov, the story of Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, an epileptic. Alexei swallows, just a little. Lev Nikolaevich, Miusov continues, had been raised on the benefaction of a wealthy landowner who'd turned Roman Catholic before his death! This had actually caused the prince great agitation when he discovered it, for he's a self-proclaimed Russian Orthodox Christian who hardly ever becomes angry with anyone. Anyway, he had spent significant time in his early twenties in Switzerland at a rehabilitation center for "idiocy" due to his falling sickness until near-full recovery brought him to St. Petersburg to seek out a distant relative, another Myshkin named Lizaveta Prokofyevna who was wed to a high-ranking General named Epanchin and with whom had three lovely daughters.

"The presence and good intentions of this Prince Myshkin in Petersburg and in his summer dacha in Pavlovsk caused scandal that made headlines in the city, and even reached Moscow; have you perchance ever heard?"

Alyosha shakes his head, weary at this point at Miusov's characteristic European Liberal insensitivity.

"Well," continues Pyotr Alexandrovich, "Prince Lev Nikolaevich, about twenty six or twenty seven at the time, became directly involved in (albeit not directly responsible for) the murder of a wealthy promiscuous woman with a supposedly humble soul beneath all the sin, who'd weaved a romantic triangle between him and some fever-brained merchant's son Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin who'd just inherited a fortune due to his father's sudden death. The Rogozhin fellow resulted in acting out the jealous murder -- a knife clean through the promiscuous woman's heart so that she hardly bled -- and being sentenced to fifteen years penal servitude in Siberia, some thirteen or fourteen years ago. Nobody has heard of this murderer since."

Again, Alyosha swallows and now with some difficulty. 

"And, after such strains to the nervous system, dear fellow, the epileptic went entirely mad." Pyotr Alexandrovich nods as though there'd be no question of such a result, ignoring the fact that just on the other side of the house lays the tormented Ivan who claims he's seen the Devil. "Upon the generosity of one good-natured officer Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky, Prince Myshkin was returned to Switzerland, and this nearly thirteen winters ago. Then, a few years later, he was visited by certain French occultist healers who apparently brought him back to his senses! Who knows how? And, now, he's involved in some surruptitious and dare I say subversive philosophical and artistic circles. These people are difficult to keep track of and they influence a great deal of Parisian society."

"Forgive me, Monsieur Miusov," Alyosha interrupts, sighing, "but, what bearing might this have on my traveling to Paris?"

"Yes, yes, lad, I'm getting to that! Do you know of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, or her comrade Rudolf Steiner, and their Theosophical Society in America? In New York?"

Alyosha jogs his memory.

"I've read of her in articles," he concedes, nodding, "mostly regarding her mentioning the extraordinary faith of the Russian Orthodox: is that correct? In comparison to those who hold to the Hindu ways, ways she's familiar with if I'm not mistaken?"

"Precisely," remarks Miusov.

The Liberal elegantly finishes one of several fish pies that Ivan had actually worked on baking with Katya for afternoon tea, to cheer up Grushenka, before Miusov's surprise visit.

Miusov continues, remarking that this Blavatsky woman has been sought after in many circles in Europe: "and, Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin has made it clear to me that, that while she's most likely a devil-worshipping charlatan luring followers into Orientalism, her very personality and her Orthodox backround -- along with her seemingly sincere fealty to the tradition -- are one in which his group of occult healers, artists, philosophers, Lord knows what else, seek a kind of equivalent."

Pyotr Alexandrovich finishes his tea.

"And, would you know it? The long-forsaken once-mad prince, who's quite verbose and magnetic I should add, has done his research into your very Monastery here and to the legacy of your Zosima! And, he offers expansive accesses to institutes, salons, personages of repute -- doctors, politicians from all corners of the world, merchants and men of power and skill! -- for an acquaintance with you and some insights into the wisdom of your former and now deceased Elder, the very reverent and charitable Monk."

Alyosha thinks to the variety of figures who could possibly have brought a Swiss-Russian epileptic prince of the Petersburg aristocracy, who's now a Parisian esotericist, to hearing of the late Elder Zosima.

"Did this liaison come through Kalganov?" he murmurs.

"Not that I know of," Pyotr Alexandrovich openly admits.

"And what of your involvement," Alyosha prods, organizing the table to make it easier for Grigory and Marfa to clear away, "if I may be so bold, if it isn't the accesses you've mentioned?"

"Alexei Fyodorovich!" Miusov looks offended. "I'm thinking of you and your two brothers, for goodness' sake, and if I meet some influential individuals it's more to appease this rather charming albeit odd prince than out of some petty necessity of mine; please be more tactful regarding my status."

Alyosha sits back in his chair as Grigory and Marfa clear the table, not without noticing their meaningful glances.

"I myself think you and the eccentric fellow would get along quite well," Pyotr Alexandrovich murmurs, with a strikingly honest tone, "if I may speak frankly."

After a moment, Alyosha admits, "It's sudden, and formidable, and I wouldn't want to leave Ivan alone, even though I trust Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtseva's devotion. I wouldn't want to deny my brother Dmitri Fyodorovich my letters along with assuring that Grushenka's letters reach him and his reach her -- I mean, Agrafena Alexandrovna Svetlova's letters."

"Not in the hopes that you might rescue them through mingling with the right people in a culture rich with more education and resources than here?" Miusov lightly asks.

Alyosha thinks of Dionysius' severed head still thinking, and tastes the new name on his tongue, the name Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin. Prince, no less.

Reminded of Solomon from this morning's comparison of John of the Cross to the Canticle of Canticles, he remembers, I have seen slaves on horseback and princes walk on the ground like slaves.

"For how long?"

"I'd say, practically, no more than a month; but I can't say for certain, for the prince's emphasis seemed less on time than on quality."

Pyotr Alexandrovich insists Alyosha take his time considering the proposal, insisting there isn't exactly a rush, "though, I must say the prince was rather excited about the seeming connection between the Pope of Rome, Leo the Thirteenth, whom had established friendly ties with the recently-assassinated Tsar, and the relations between the politics and theologies of Rome and Russia. It all returns to that Madame Blavatsky business, and her strange society and companions. Europe certainly has caved into the fetish of the Orient; Rome seeks to warn against it, and the Christian socialists too."

In tactful terms, Miusov does mention how impressive it had been to hear Ivan explain his church-state theories three years ago in Elder Zosima's cell.

That does it for Alyosha, who, swooning slightly, cries out that he'll go.

"For Mitya and Vanya, for the women who love them, I'll go."

+|)mitri+1van+/\lexei+
|<ARAMAZO\/

As Alyosha breaks the news that he'll be leaving next week, Ivan in his own way reveals that he'd already known this would happen, though he's befuddled nonetheless.

Grushenka and Katya take it hard despite Alyosha's iron resolve to find some manner or some figure to get his brothers back, in person and in spirit.

Kolya is rather perplexed himself, though not unflattered to be placed as substitute to Alyosha in the role of auxiliary schoolmaster at the gymnasium.

"If only old man Ilyusha could see me now, Karamazov!" he cries, shaking his head in joyful nostalgia.

"Don't think he doesn't, my golden light," Alyosha grins. "Watch them boys, Krasotkin, and bring branches of lilacs to Ilyusha's grave! Visit the Snegiryovs!"

"Ach, why you fathering me?" Kolya whines.

"You want to know?"

Kolya shrugs, curious.

"If I act fatherly to you, I'll have an excuse not to father myself and just act like a kid while in Paris surrounded by all these know-it-alls." Alyosha winks. "End up waving my arms around and smashing something worth a whole fortune while ranting like my brother about Loyola and the Reconquista, entertaining me with all his theatrical and yet brilliant ideas, like he did before he became ill."

"You said Spanish stuff wasn't so bad."

"I stand by that, for, it's the French that have this obsession with separating the head from the body and wondering if it can still think."

"To be frank, Karamazov, there's loads of idiots in the world who might as well not have their head connected to their body," Kolya wisely observes, "and you know I don't mean your poor brother Ivan Fyodorovich, Lord have mercy on him. I mean real idiots who aren't touched by the intelligence of having their heart in the right place, who don't love their brothers regardless of what they've done because there's no judgment but God's, who don't forgive others sincerely after becoming righteously angry. What they look for, I can't begin to think about, otherwise I'd be acting like them."

Alyosha marvels at his young friend.

"Careful you don't fall into any of those Parisian catacombs, dear one, my Russian brother," Kolya adds with his usual candor though with a hint of impressive solemnity that further arrests our hero, "they say there are labyrinths down there no one can escape from, and you wonder why anyone'd go down there in the first place, what they're searching for: you've helped us here in this simple town take life and death in stride and with faith! Who knows what kind of idiocy them Europeans have been engaged in, what with their rays of enlightenment, flying into the sun for one moment of blazing glory?"

Epilepsy, begins a hellish litany in Alyosha's frightened mind. Romantic triangles. A wealthy promiscuous woman with a supposedly humble soul beneath all the sin, who'd weaved a romantic triangle between him and some fever-brained merchant's son Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin who'd just inherited a fortune due to his father's sudden death. A knife clean through the promiscuous woman's heart so that she hardly bled. Madness leading to jealous murder leading to madness. Aristocracy. Military. Devil-worship. Penal servitude in Siberia. Orientalism. America. Headless saints.

Alyosha has suddenly gone so pale, so faint, Kolya goes over to him while laughing to kiss and reassure him. The young man will be teaching the boys, reading his Scripture, visiting the Snegiryovs as well as respectfully visiting Ivan Fyodorovich, Katerina Ivanovna and Agrafena Alexandrovna in the house with Grigory Vasilievich and Marfa Ignatievna; he'll be sending Alyosha letters and especially informing him on any letter or letters from Dmitri Fyodorovich.

"That's what your journey's for, isn't it?" Kolya encourages. "To get help for your loved ones?"

Alyosha absently nods.

Chapter Text

15 May 1881
Zheltuga

Alyosha,

Thank you, dear brother, thank you. How can I explain how much my heart yearns for you? When the guards distribute our letters, I see your penmanship, and I trace over the script before I even read it. Oh, how I miss you terribly. It gladdens me to hear of you teaching and mentoring the boys at school. My cherub, thank you for assuring me of your well-being and of Vanya's stability. Thank you for assuring Grushenka writes to me within each of your letters, in that flourished way of hers, my precious darling writing of her daily comings and goings and of her gratitude to you of her benefaction, of her serene love of my miserable and unworthy person. How she's calmed, my Grusha. How she's matured, as though she were truly my bride. I love her, Alexei, and I will always be repeating it, don't you know?

The days come and go here in Zheltuga, for I'm blessed not to be debased and tortured and dying in Kara, Alexei Fyodorovitch. My comrades get on all right now that it's warm. We search up gold within the mines. Gold has its mystery, after all. Ha! I recall Katerina Osipovna Khokhlakova's ravings on the "gold mines." I can see the woman in my mind's eye going on and on. Please send Lise my greetings the next time you write her, by the way. I can't and I won't complain about the conditions here, at least not consciously. The work is still hard, the food terrible, and yet we have all the time in the world to contemplate the meaning of life. You already know that I'm sometimes wracked with the unbearable urges toward suicide, that sometimes I'm ill and pray that it's not scurvy or typhoid or anemia or consumption when I forget that I could be in Kara. But, I'm all right. My guardian angel has been watching over me. Is alchemy so forbidden, as I find bits of gold in these Chinese lands, that I should be led to believe that Christ's greatest treasure is His body which heals the human soul? How I long for the Divine Liturgy, Alyosha, now that I've turned to the face of the Savior.

Every day, I still read Scripture. I've contemplated often on what you've said to in your last letter, so as to prepare for Pentecost on the twelfth. On Nimrod building up Babel so it may be struck down and the whole world's peoples disperse with so many different languages and customs.* On St. Luke's account in the the Acts of the Apostles, of the Paraclete descending through tongues of fire upon the Theotokos and the gathered disciples, after which all can understand each other (how the Lord restores what He has once struck down!).* And, of the account of St. John's Gospel of the Savior's beckoning of the faithful to come and drink of Him, to receive living water from Him, a precursor to the giving of the Paraclete. How reticent are the Pharisees in their polemic against Christ for speaking so, and oh how Nicodemus recalls his dialogue with the Lord on being born again and on the Spirit blowing where it will!*

After the Pharisees' wicked gossip of the Messiah coming from Galilee and not Bethlehem, in their ignorance of the truth, after Christ mercifully saves the adultress from being stoned, the Lord says, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life."* Water and light, Alyoshka! Water and light for me, for my wretched soul in this dark wasteland where we are often treated like dogs! And, yet, the Son of Man died for me and for us all, so that we may have new life, so we may be born again in the Spirit! Praise God. How mysterious the Scriptures are, brother. How blessed you are for guiding my foolish mind through these gentle rivulets of God's Logos.

Brother, I'm all right. But, I worry for Vanya. I worry because I incidentally worry for Katya. I don't approve one bit -- none, nothing! -- of what you've said that the spring is here and they're still static together and that Katya appears to follow Ivan more and more into sleepy lethargy toward the living world! I know the real Katerina Ivanovna, the gentle Christian woman. Katya has unwittingly made an ikon of me. This has been her doing since the beginning, four years ago, and I've gone along with it, fool that I am! To her, I am still as her knight. This cannot continue, as she loves Ivan and I Grushenka. This tomfoolery should have ended by now, devil take it. I look in my heart, in contemplation, and keep concluding that it is her idolatry that keeps her from flooding her heart out to our brother. I feel it. Please, Alyosha, tell me you understand.

I would see them wed. Yes, Alyoshechka. I would see Katerina Ivanovna confess before a priest her childish idolatry of me: to let me go, and to permit God to reveal how her destiny lies in rescuing Ivan by demonstrating zeal. How can I continue on? How can I hope for a hymn [and here Dmitri sketches out a small ambiguous kind of American flag, as code for an ephemeral escape plan] while you tell me that our Ivan remains bedridden and lost in his strange soap-bubble notions and dreams? That he still yells at times about the man in the checkered pants who waits and watches to taunt our brother into thinking he'll destroy the God-man in every living soul so that the earth will sing Hallelujah? That he vacillates from boiling wrath to childlike tears for yours and his dear mother?

Brother! Brother, we both know he never wrought such a wicked confession from Smerdyakov the night of the latter's suicide. Don't you know? It was a more elaborate hallucination than even the subsequent one in his room! Wasn't it? I'm sure he visited the epileptic, our sad and very cruel half-brother whose poor soul occupies Hades. But, Vanya did not wring out such an elaborate confession from Pavel Fyodorovich. The latter was on the verge of death, and wouldn't have lasted another night whether he'd hanged himself or not. Poor soul. Oh, my soul is becoming quite perturbed again. All right, all right.

Katerina could very well help cure Ivan! See how I emphasize these words. How, you ask? Alyosha, you know. You may be like an angel, truly, but, you're a man. What's more, you're a Karamazov. That's why you're so strong in having sacrificed your lust for life and your greedy thirst for nectar and your need to spread your seed and see any sons and daughters you may have with a happy woman. You know that were Katya to admire Grusha a little more, be a little more like her, merry and fecund (oh, how I love Agrafena Alexandrovna, how I miss her!), she would enliven Ivan. I've thought a lot lately that our two sisters in heart are like Leah and Rachel.* Of course Rachel is the aesthetic and more naturally polite sister, but, she is barren. I am like Jacob loving Leah by loving Grushenka, and our love is fruitful even while it's still not consummated. Ivan is like Jacob loving Rachel by loving Katerina, their love one of transcendentals and abstractions of the intellect. Surely, I love Katerina also, but, like a beautiful ideal; this isn't true love! Rachel weeps for the children, and will not be comforted.* Katerina weeps for lost innocence, weeps in disappointment that human nature is so low, weeps that she implicated me in court out of spite. Ah, she is Ivan's bride, they are so alike. 

Alyosha, beg any of the priests to wed them and hastily, won't you? Ivan isn't an invalid anymore. You must talk to Katya about what I've said. You must bring them together. You must find a way to bring lifeblood to their love. Ah, how Roman I sound, how like a medieval French troubador, and certainly like a tsygan (though not like a Jew, Heaven forbid). It's somewhat expected, I surmise. Our Motherland changes daily, and, as you're well aware, us katorzhnye are the first witnesses. You already know my thoughts on Alexander's assassination. Ivan is not a socialist, nor a nihilist. Ivan is a genius trapped in the prison of pride. But, he has us! And, he has Russian Orthodoxy at his disposal. And, yes, even some Jesuitical casuistry (or, perhaps equivocation is the better term). Ivan is a Christian at heart. Our brother is probably more a prophet than you and I put together, God forgive me for speaking so boldly. Oh, I let my passions run away with me.

Vanya's mind is quicker than a ray of light to come to logical conclusions. But, it wants for the darkness of the Ninth Hour. I've learned of light here in the mines, Lyoshenka. I've learned that visible light is quite idiotic. Invisible light, however -- ah! -- like the light of Christ, the Light of the World, invisible light takes the grueling journey from the Temple all the way through the City up to Golgotha where it is hidden away in the burden of sin and death as an offering, like the Child in Egypt was hidden from Herod, until darkness falls and the Savior gives up His Spirit in order to descend to Hades. That's Ivan's journey, so that he may become devoted to God, and to keep special devotion to the Mother of God and the Archangel St. Michael, who will beseech Christ to keep the Evil One at great distance.

What can come first? His conversion, or his answer to Katya's love if she were only to show it like the Bride in the Canticle of Canticles? Ah, what a Book! What a holy Book, and what a challenge to a Karamazov to read that kind of holy Book in a way that does not pervert its meaning. Anyway, Katya must yearn for Ivan like the Queen of Sheba does for Solomon, the youngest son of David and architect of the Temple. Woman must love man, Alexei. We yearn for women. We can't all be celibate like St. Paul says to the Corinthians.*

To end, Festive Pentecost, my glimmer in the night sky! I await next month's letter. Kiss Grushenka for me with all your heart, and remind her daily of my love and of my hope. Oh, she is my Queen of Sheba. Love Ivan, love Katya, and bring them together! Greetings to all and be well, Alyosha, my cherub.

Your own flesh and blood, in Christ's love and the Theotokos' protection, 

Mitya

+|)mitri+1van+/\lexei+
|<ARAMAZO\/

"Mitya! Mitya! Don't you care about a father's blessing? And what if I should curse you?"

Alyosha's unsoncious cry wakes both himself and Ivan, and they both call out "Papa?" at the same time and in similar childish tones.

One glances at the other and vice versa, and neither man knows for a moment what's happened. It's two days since Miusov's arrived from Paris and one day since Alyosha announced to Ivan and his friends that he'd be leaving in a week. Dmitri's letter had just arrived in the afternoon post, and Alyosha had decided to read it to himself on the sofa next to Ivan's bedside while the latter rested.

Without meaning to, Alexei had fallen asleep after reading twice, and it seems that the cry to Dmitri he and Ivan had heard three years ago emit from Fyodor Pavlovich in Zosima's cell unwittingly burst from him.

"Alyosha!" Ivan now howls at the young man, eyes ablaze with terror. "Come back! Papa, go be at peace! Torment us no more, don't use your son's body to come haunt us! There are no;" he swallows; "hooks in Hell, didn't your Alexeichik tell you? Just the sun, leagues and leagues up from the bottom of the waters where you are;" and Alyosha gathers himself and stands to move to his hysterical brother; "where darkness surrounds you as you move along with the old ouroboros! You'll see that every sea will dry with the sun's rays leaving only desert salt, you'll see! You'll be on land again one day, in the freezing firmament of bliss beyond the azure sky, not in a billion years if you don't resist the serpent's cycling!"

"Sh, brother, my cry just came out as a result of a letter from Dmitri," Alyosha softly insists, waving the letter. "It was just leftovers of a dream, sh."

"What?" Ivan mewls, looking from side to side. "What am I doing here? Where's Pyotr Alexandrovich Miusov? Miusov is here, isn't he? Who's... who's alive?"

When Alysoha patiently brings Ivan back to the proper time and place, the latter morosely asks when Dmitri will arrive, "so that I may tell him that all existents are lawful, yes, but, that they are simultaneously analogous to natural laws, to eternal laws, to the divine law, like old Aquinas wrote as to educate the Dominican Inquisitors!"

Alyosha crosses himself to stop his trembling, and then moves to relight the candles to the ikons.

"Once you're calm, I'll show you the letter Mitya has sent from Zheltuga, and then we'll have supper while we ponder what he might mean." Alyosha gazes upon a reproduction of Theophanes' depiction of the Transfiguration on Mt. Tabor. "He's as well as can be since the weather's warmer, and Easter's passed and Pentecost is coming. He sends hope and love to us and to Grusha and all our friends."

Indeed, after a supper with a lethargic Grushenka, who hasn't learned yet of her beloved's letter, and deeper into the sunny evening typical of June in Russia, Ivan reads and studies Dmitri's letter.

"Me and him two sides of the patriarch Jacob?" he squints, befuddled.

"I think he means to compare Grusha and Katya to the allegories of Leah and Rachel," Alyosha mildly argues.

"Funny, I perceived him once we all returned here together and I learned of his greed for Father's money, to be more like Leah's ten sons born from Jacob," Ivan murmurs, lucid now, "and I fancied myself Joseph, the first born of the lovely Rachel, the favored dream prophet and inheritor of fine things, who'd have to fight my way out of unjust slavery and climb the ranks until I was practically Pharaoh."

Alyosha listens and contemplates. The lights upon the ikon still cast a warm glow on the image of Christ with Moses and Elijah, and with Sts. Peter and the sons of Zebedee.

"I imagine you'd have been as Benjamin, Joseph's full brother as you are mine," continues Ivan, solemnly, "and like Joseph I would trick my older brothers -- well, my one older brother --- by hiding with you without your knowledge a precious silver chalice to test whether when my splendid identity would be discovered I'd be begged for mercy and forgiveness by Dmitri, and that you would rejoice at being reunited with me and appreciate me for my trick -- for I've never longed to harm you."*

"I see, and, what of our father's blessings?" Alyosha whispers, not looking at Ivan.

Ivan stares out the window at the pines, spruces and at the azaleas in the afternoon sun. 

"Papa was no Jacob."

"Wasn't he?"

"He was Onan,* and may God have mercy on him."

Alyosha doesn't argue, happy to hear the prayer from his brother's heart for their father Fyodor Pavlovich.

"And... and Smerdyakov, our half-brother?"

Ivan looks at Alyosha.

"I wish I could say he was like Absalom, traitorous murderous son of David and Maacah," he breathes, and sighs long and sadly, "but, now it seems more likely that his counterpart in my ridiculous musings would have been the nameless son born to David and Bathsheba, the babe who quickly died as divine punishment of David's murder of Uriah; a cursed child, but, innocent in his own way, Alexei Fyodorovich."*

Tears choke at Ivan's throat.

"You are kind," Alyosha gently smiles, admiring Vanya's heart.

"I, I... murdered Smerdyakov."

"No."

"I'm Cain of the fields, jealous of you, my younger brother Abel who sacrifices flesh in humility! Guilty of fratricide not only to my blood brothers but the brotherhood of all mankind! And, I murdered Papa, and so I'm like Absalom! 'Absalom, oh, Absalom!' I should have been the one to die by hanging like Absalom did!"* Ivan's now screaming, tearing at the sheets and rising from the bed. "Would Papa have wept for me if he'd have lived and found out my plot, crying out, 'Vanya, oh, Vanya!'? He did used to talk like that to me, you know... tenderly assure me of his affection, laugh as though we were comrades." All color has drained from Ivan's complexion and his lips have gone a certain grey; Alyosha remembers the Inquisitor. "He went to kiss me upon my leaving for Chermashnya while I turned away in revulsion! I've sold my soul! I've met the Accuser and let him possess me! Aren't I Judas, who should hang himself? Tell me, former monk!"

"Ivan," Alyosha takes Ivan's face in his hands, which have grown stronger in three years, and are strong enough against Ivan's weak and atrophied body, "you're named after Ioannes -- John! -- not just the Beloved Evangelist but the Baptist, too! Salome danced for your head to King Herod* -- yes, another allegory for Dmitri in his arrogance, as cruel as it may be! And Katerina has paid for such a dance, for showing that drunken letter of his first to you and then before the court so as to damn us all!"

Ivan huffs and falls nearly limp in Alyosha's arms. Sobs begin wracking from his chest, mucus dripping.

"Nevertheless," Alyosha assures, stroking his hair, "she loves you and asks forgiveness every day with every poppy and every caress, every encouraging dialogue, every reading and every tea she serves you with a shy virgin smile! She pays for her dance for every lashing she gives herself in her heart for her simultaneous idolatry and loathing of Mitya, and she's doing it for you! You are the noble one she loves."

Ivan falls to Alyosha's feet and begs forgiveness.

The following day Alyosha decides to show Dmitri's monthly letter to Katerina Ivanovna, which causes the woman much surprise.

"Grusha would despise me," Katya mutters, obstinately shaking her head though she's pink with such thoughts of healing her beloved Ivan through passion and romance as Dmitri suggests. "What nonsense from a Siberian prisoner! I would arrive here with my dowry and inherit one half of the house and portions of yours and Vanya's lands from Fyodor Pavlovich, as would my children, and Ivan Fyodorovich himself would always doubt me because Agrafena Alexandrovna would never let me rest for taking what's hers and Dmitri's!"

"Agrafena Alexandrovna only wants to follow her beloved Dmitri Fyodorovich wherever he goes," Alyosha says as though it's plain as day.

"Even to Hades?" Katerina's tone is both sour and curious, eyes averted.

"I will never allow my brothers who still live to descend to Hades," swears Alyosha with a confident laugh.

Swallowing, he observes, "Of marital conjugality, Katerina Ivanovna, of the prospect that Ivan Fyodorovich will improve so as to stand strong as a good husband should -- regaining health and finding means to work with dignity for you and the children you'd have if it be God's will -- it would take time and sacrifice on your part and in the name of charity granted through grace."

Katya releases a sigh and asks of Alyosha's journey to Paris, to venture to rescue Mitya and Vanya.

"I do find Mitya's message timely, and would actually prefer if you'd wed Vanka before I leave in a week's time," Alyosha admits, "to which Ivan agrees, and wishes to discuss with you today, although I understand it seems very reckless."

While Katerina Ivanovna and Ivan Fyodorovich do discuss the practicalities of marriage, as well as bond through their years-long abstract parrying which sends them into a stratosphere all their own, Alyosha shares all with Grushenka in the gazebo.

Putting the goldstained letter down with a delightful laugh, she exclaims to Alyosha that his eldest brother "is a madman, without doubt! Mad! And, you! You plan to play savior to us all, my holy and foolish cherry pie of a lad?"

"A wordly prince awaits me in Paris," Alyosha reminds and then gestures to the letter, "as does a humble prince await you on the Chinese border, madman though he might be, zealous with Scriptural references and mystical notions about Brides and Bridegrooms, deaths and rebirths, the blinding light of Mt. Tabor."

"Well, if we're to get Biblical," Grushenka jogs her memory, "along with being as fecund as the matriarchal Leah, I should also be likened to Queen Jezebel."*

Alyosha smiles in a way he knows Grushenka will feel terrible.

"All right, dove!" Grushenka inwardly scolds herself and then turns again to Mitya's letter to fervently kiss it. "How about questioning whether I should be one of the ten virgins the Savior mentions keeps store of her lamp oil before the Bridegroom arrives at the wedding feast, versus one of the ten who use it all up in anticipation and therefore can't be admitted? To the wedding at the end of the æon, to the Apocalypse?"

"Store your lamp oil, carry your light, for the feasting of the finest wine at Cana."

"That shall I do, my dearest, and you keep your sword sharp in case your prince is less like a Jonathan to your David and more like a King Saul who'd see you perish for daring to take holy Jerusalem!* You're off to France, after all, to meet men knowing all kinds of Catholic casuistry and equivocal magic tricks, as Mitenka mentions here." Grushenka points to Dmitri's letter. "A virginal Russian youth, the youngest of his brothers, up against Goliath, up against the Holy Roman Empire!" The woman crosses herself. "May the Savior and the Mother of God bestow upon you the deepest faith."

Alyosha remembers reading from some Estonian mystic, he can't place just whom, that John of the Cross' Dark Night is often misunderstood as Augustinian madness the likes of which overtook Martin Luther when it's truly a Catholic equivalent in the tradition of the Carmelites of the Orthodox theoria.

Likewise, Ignatius of Loyola's Examen of Conscience can easily be mistaken for Calvin's Manichaen double-predestination when it is more a kind of softening on the Western Filioque doctrine so as to concede to the profundity of Hesychasm and Palamism.

The young man keeps this is mind when, four days later, Ivan Fyodorovich cleaned and dressed and beaming out a bit of the handsome Byronic academic he'd been three years ago and a rose-beautiful Katerina Ivanovna in lace before Father Paissy wed in the church with many guests whom our hero hadn't thought would show such heart towards his maligned family. Ivan stands straight without faltering throughout the whole ceremony, and Katerina holds fast to him as she recites prayers to the Mother of God for the blessing of uniting with a man she'd learned to love and with whom she's now determined to show so much more of her vulnerability.

Forgive, forgive, forgive, Alyosha hears the voice of his Elder crying out from his heart, as though his prophetic Cana dream had indeed come true.

I, too, my dear, I, too, have been called, called and chosen! Why are you hiding here, out of sight? Come and join us. We are rejoicing, we are drinking new wine, the wine of new and great joy. See how many guests there are? Here are the bridegroom and the bride, here is the wise ruler of the feast, tasting the new wine. Why are you marveling at me? I gave a little onion, and so I am here. And there are many here who only gave an onion, only one little onion. ... What are our deeds? And you, quiet one, you, my meek boy, today you, too, were able to give a little onion to a woman who hungered. Begin, my dear, begin, my meek one, to do your work! And do you see our Sun, do you see Him? Do not be afraid of Him. Awful is His greatness before us, terrible is His loftiness, yet He is boundlessly merciful, He became like us out of love, and He is rejoicing with us, transforming water into wine, that the joy of the guests may not end. He is waiting for new guests, He is ceaselessly calling new guests, now and unto ages of ages... They are bringing the new wine, the vessels are being brought in...

"I remember us... in the Metropolis restauarant," Ivan stutters privately out to Alyosha much later in the evening, as the guests leave the merry albeit subdued feast. Coming together to embrace his younger brother, weeping in joy and in fear and in penitence, he swears, "and I now, along with accepting God, I... I accept His world, Alyosha, His lovely world, the world in which water may turn to wine, tears of misery to tears of joy... and I ask... forgiveness."

Pulling back, Vanya looks all around and then back at Alyosha who's also silently weeping.

"I ask forgiveness of those I hated, because I forgive them, and 'He must increase and I must decrease;'" he smiles, and Alyosha knows he will yearn for this smile every moment he's away, and thanks his Savior for it; "like my holy namesake says baptizing in the Jordan."

This time it's Ivan who leans forward and bestows the kiss of peace to Alexei's lips, whispering, "'how inscrutable are His judgments, and how mysterious are His ways,' and I will offer my proud inquisitions as a sacrifice for faith that 'He reveals truth to those who are like children.'"

"Literary theft," Alyosha whispers back, heart overflowing with the living water.

Chapter Text

09 Jun. 1881

Vanya,

I've arrived safely in Paris this early afternoon, according to schedule. I'm well, just a bit tired. Please read this letter carefully, Ivan. My heart aches without you being present. But, I'm so gladdened at your being wed to Katya. I'm so very consoled, my dear older brother.

My host, Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin is gracious. Don't worry, he's renounced the noble title. I'm just getting your pride to raise its porcupine needles. It's to keep you on your toes. Ah, how I miss you already. The man, a year or two short of forty, was raised a Russian aristocrat. But, from the few hours I've spent in his company thus far, he seems wary of what his title has ever entailed for anyone in his tumultuous life. I perceive a gentle albeit haunted soul, and a European sensibility. Years added up, he's lived in the West nearly half his life. Pertaining to his personality, seemingly there's nothing ridiculous about him. He's not a holy fool. Miusov cruelly quipped at one point that he's sometimes still called as he was used to be called very often: an idiot.

In congruency with his illness, he's deeply sympathetic. This perhaps to a fault. His stoicism is forced and necessary. He's more likely to be affable and cheery. The vacillation makes him, in my judgment thus far, idiosyncratic. I've seen a shiver in him once so far that indicates he's experienced loss of sense. The gentleman even joked about it. Now, you should learn of some of his backstory. Myshkin had been tactically briefed by Miusov before my arrival on our family's history, and I've learned from the latter that the prince used to suffer from epilepsy and had twice before in his life suffered bouts of catatonia and psychosis -- the last episode, in '68, being so strong that the Genevan doctors held out no hope until a group from Paris went searching through European rehabilitation centers and some of its members spent a year by his side reading and speaking to him till he returned to his senses. The episode came on when Myshkin had been the first in witnessing a murder in Petersburg, his being bound deeply to both victim and perpetrator. I don't have extensive details. I'd rather provide the prince with the freedom to reveal himself. Needless to say, there's no judgment on his part around our family. Isn't it strange, don't you think, that there are particular commonalities? Foreboding if we consider that they're horrific commonalities. But, he's a man entirely cured from madness, Vanka. That's what matters.

I sense that his sympathy is an unexpected gift in this prospect of bringing Mitya to peace if not helping him return to us.

Well, I had two days on the train, and the landscapes I saw! Took my breath away! I hardly wanted to sleep. This world is so beautiful and expansive, and yet so small. Some of the towns and villages were so simple and charming, and the cities so magnificent, and some were happy and others sad, but, it was all new to me. I waved hello to every soul, and I hoped we'd meet again after the æon. Right, so, forgive me if I'm writing in a rather overly excited way.

A note: speaking only briefly about this to my host, I've had an admittedly wild idea of turning to South America's gold mines -- Colombia's in particular as its gold industry is the world's largest -- as a north star to where to direct Dmitri. I'm glad you're laughing as you read this, ha. I live to hear you laugh even if it's at the expense of my honor. Please read. This idea would be on the pretext that Mitya'd remain on paper a prisoner according to Russian law, but actually laboring for a private company. Common practice. He'd be utilizing his keen knack for identifying the precious mineral in the rivers and mines (and, who knew until being condemened to the mines that brother Dmitri had a natural talent for optics? and that he had absorbed your previous random musings on geology, to combine into a sixth sense for locating gold!) in a continent with which Russia seeks to assess its current and future political and economic ties. You know better than I do that Latin America is young and volatile. So recently freed from Spain, she's anxious to fend off her capitalist and genocidal northern neighbor from yet another colonization.

I would see Dmitri escape to Latin America rather than to the United States. My thoughts are that it'd be far easier for Mitya while in Colombia to slip away and find some remote untraceable town or city and then send word to us of his location. What with the prospective political connections I seek to make here, he could return home under a pseudonym.

Yes, it would be reckless. Yet, truly, I can't stop thinking about your smiling face on the night of yours and Katya's wedding, seemingly a reckless ceremony but in truth one providenced by God Himself. I still see your smile at our last embrace farewell. How much improved you've become in a mere week! And to think it was occurring in your heart more gradually than I was made aware of. Katya must have known. Oh, there is so much to hope for, Ivan. I'm constantly praying now for yours and Katerina's happiness. Love each other. Treasure isn't gold but the soft dark love between husband and wife in which rays of light prove ecstatically blinding. Ah, now I've gone talking like a holy fool. It must be practice for the Roman Catholic mystics and poets I'm to meet. Forgive me? Return my kisses, for I send you many. 

I've written letters to your new spouse as well as to Grushenka and Kolya, briefing them less on what I've told you but showering them with the tender affection I sense would embarrass you if I expressed it in a letter: please, between the four of you, write to me weekly, and especially when there's a reply from Mitya to the letter I mailed on the seventh.

I'll offer far more when I've had some rest and seen and experienced more. Below my signature is my address. Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin's house sits on the hill of Montmartre, with a view of the construction of the Basilique de Sacré Cœur. What a place, Paris! The weather is beautiful, warmer than Staraya Russa, and the city truly lives up to its legends.

May the Savior continue His blessings on you, Festive Pentecost, my twin,

Alyosha

+/\lexei |<aramazo\/+
¥uródivyj୧ ♡ |-|oly ƒools
+|_yova /\/\yshki|\|+

"I hope these letters find my family well," Alyosha prays aloud once he's back out on the streets of Montmartre in the early evening, after submitting his letters to the post office.

Ivan had been right about Paris' skies. Rosy colored clouds shyly suggest a misty half-hour rain that might spill at any moment.

Prince Myshkin stands beside our hero, and along with his being older and taller looks down at Alyosha with marvel at his youthful demeanor as though clearly regarding his admirable soul. The prince has done this several times since the latter has arrived, since they traveled back to his home and settled Alyosha's luggage into his room and when the young Karamazov immediately begun writing letters to his loved ones.

"I hope your brother and your new sister-in-law are happy, and, again, Alexei Fyodorovich: I wish you hadn't felt the urgency to come here so soon after such a sacrament!"

The prince's large blue eyes with their feathery lashes flutter as though he were imagining a mythical romance between Ivan and Katerina. Though Alyosha's family members are obviously strangers to him, Myshkin speaks like he knows them and makes it sound like he indeed does, for he seems to know the good in all people and act on that pretext of familiarity. Then, he insists he should have inquired further about whether Alexei had any pressing matters that should surely have taken precedence to coming to Paris, and that he should have pressed Miusov to clarify to him that there was no urgency.

"But, I'm happy to hear that Ivan Fyodorovich's health is far more improved, according to what you've been telling me and also according to how Monsieur Miusov had described your brother's condition -- the Liberal can exaggerate sometimes," Myshkin waves an elegant hand, "it's a habit easily acquired living enough time in France."

Alyosha blushes. The young man has been deeply impressed by his host since his reception at Gare du Nord and when introduced to him by Miusov, who afterwards had hurried back to his own home to rest while the former two journeyed to Montmartre on a horse-drawn tramway that admittedly fascinated Alyosha. Next to Prince Myshkin, in this city so progressive in thought and art and technology, our hero has felt during these past hours illiterate and immature and quite like a superstitiously-religious country bumpkin. Strangely enough, he admits, these are his own scruples and directly from Myshkin he only feels appreciation and one that reminds him of the Elder. Alyosha admires the prince in the way he described to Ivan. Myshkin is descended from royalty, after all, and Alyosha didn't lie in his letter: though life hasn't been kind to him, he's as lovely as a prince can be, even Christ-like in the way his face looks as though it tends to turn toward the sun. Perhaps where he'd once been pale and sallow, his complexion is now ruddy, his eyes clear, his stature healthy.

"No, Prince, I insisted on coming with haste, and I insist again on the suddenness of the wedding. It hadn't been something planned; it was arranged in four days, but, it was the final step in a love that had grown from passionate spite to tenderness over three years."

"Well!" Myshkin pockets his hands and prudently ponders his next words. "Vive l'amour!" The joy in his eyes moves Alyosha, and his laughter prompts our hero to join in.

"Ah, oui, vive l'amour," Alyosha heartily confirms and glances up at the sky, which blushes in place of his cheeks.

"Come, then, Alexei Fyodorovich," Myshkin gently palms Alyosha's shoulder and gestures that they head in the direction of his home. "I insist we drink a Provençal rosé to the couple, to your arrival, to our working together, and so that you may more easily sleep tonight!"

The prince moves the willing Alyosha along.

"Come, there's a café by my house that keeps fine and reasonably priced bottles, and we can share one between us -- have you tried rosé from the Côtes de Provence?"

Myshkin proposes his telling Alyosha all about the area, of enormous lavender fields as far as the eye can see, of the warm Mediterranean. With his friends here in Paris, he's traveled with the primary goal of visiting the Church of the Three Marys.

"This area is a place of beauty and mystery, a place in which the soul may more easily marvel at the Savior; oh, it's a place I would wish any soul to visit so as to find peace."

Alyosha confesses excitedly, all at once: "I've never had rosé, Prince, no! The finest wine I've had is champagne and I'll admit to ignorance towards the art of vinification and whether or not the champagne I had was of good quality -- it was given as a gift to the monks, and they seemed to like it! ...and I myself did like it, though it went to my head rather quickly."

Meanwhile, he recalls the legends he's heard about strange pagan syncretism in southern France, and the Three Marys.

"I'm grateful to be here and as your guest, Prince, and, yes, after sharing some wine and hearing of Provence I should certainly appreciate rest."

"Please call me Lyova, if it isn't much trouble," Myshkin asks, tone mild, suddenly downcast. "As I mentioned, my title doesn't have much bearing, and it's brought on more pain than pride."

"Oh, then, Lyova it shall be! Forgive me, and, likewise, please call me Alyosha!" Alyosha folds his hands together, earnestly, smiling sweetly. "Alyoshechka! Lyoshenka! Whatever you like!"

Naturally, by the time two bottles have been finished while the pink shower passes and the vermilion sun sets to the indigo night, Myshkin and Alyosha have bonded to the point to where the younger has begun candidly sharing details about Fyodor Pavlovich's murder and Mitya's trial and sentence.

"What a lovely Basilique that will be once finished," Alyosha suddenly slurs, pointing out the window to the scaffolding at the very top of this large urban hill. "Wouldn't it be nice if it resembled our cathedrals, Prin-- I mean, Lev Niko-- I mean, Lyova?"

"It will, Alyosha!" Myshkin's eyes glimmer with delight as he takes his new young friend's hand. "How did you know that, dear sir? The architecture's plans are so that the basilica be topped by several onion domes."

"I just knew," Alyosha licks and gently bites at his own lips, savoring in his Kamazovian way the Provençal lavender and grapefruit notes in the wine. "Sometimes, I... get feelings. Now, I understand this hill to be the place in which Dionysius the Areopagite walked with his severed head."

"Ah, well, certain personages now attribute that legend to a third century saint-bishop named Denis and no longer the Areopagite, but, some still hold to the old legend."

The prince sighs and looks back to Alyosha and commends him on the knowledge, remarking it's not one usually circulated outside of insider Catholics. The butte, the highest point, he remarks, the location of the Basilique, is said to have been where Íñigo de Loyola initiated his Society.

"The Catholics within Paris see this basilica as a penitence for France's betrayal of God by atheist ideals, and its dedication to the Sacred Heart and proposed perpetual adoration of the Sacrament is symbolic of inner martyrdom, of the mysticism we're here," he sighs and falls a little deeper into love with the dewy-eyed Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, "discussing so sweetly as brothers in Christ."

"Loyola," breathes Alyosha in total wonder. "Oh, Lev Nik-- I mean..."

"Call me Prince Lev Nikolaevich if it's your instinct, then," Myshkin chuckles.

"Of Loyola I could tell you much, Lev Nikolaevich, Lyova, my Prince, because Vanya felt haunted by that man and his Society, as well as by Antichrist whom he mistook for Christ and viceversa." Alyosha suddenly trembles. "I think I understand inner martyrdom, and I miss my Elder Zosima."

Heart moved, not wanting to push the young man any further but showing respect to the very Elder he's so curious about, Myshkin bows his head and crosses himself in the Orthodox fashion, forehead to chest to right shoulder and finally to left.

Just when he's about to wisely suggest they head back to his home for a small supper and then sleep, Alyosha continues speaking as though falling into a kind of hypnosis as the wine alters his body and his mind, leaving Myshkin surprised.

"Yes, yes," his voice is actually gruff with sensuality, "right first and then left! But, the Catholics cross to the left first and then to the right, and, so, how are we to understand the ignoble side to lead to the noble, dearest Myshkin?"

Lev laughs so as to draw the young man to cheer.

"Ah, well, Alyoshenka, there is much to talk about which might better be discussed tomorrow--"

"Ivan swears he saw the Prince of the World, nearly every night, for two months, beginning with the night before he left for Moscow so that this infernal calamity could occur," Alyosha's face has begun turning grey, and he frowns, and his lip trembles like he could sob, "and I think I understand inner martyrdom."

Myshkin inhales sharply.

"I'm sure you do," he says very sincerely, moved but remaining alert.

Alyosha looks out to the scaffolding on the top of the hill, at the townhouses bathed in twilight of so old and mysterious a city. Forgive, forgive, forgive.

"Is God's mercy so great that it can extend to... a man who'd cut off the fingers of a young child and crucify it and laugh while it took four hours to die?" Alyosha brokenly asks. "Ivan gave a book containing that story to my betrothed;" his eyes glance quickly at Myshkin's stoic and yet deep ones; "I was betrothed to a girl of fifteen back then, Lyova, and my brother's madness or his diable so affected her that she added to that story not only that she'd enjoy such a spectacle but to witness it eating pineapple compote."

Martyrdom, Alyosha continues, as though lost in the memory, is from the Greek meaning "to witness," and there were five seals on the envelope for containing the three thousand roubles Fyodor Pavlovich was supposedly killed for, five seals like those in the Apocalypse containing the souls of martyrs.

"You've 'witnessed' too," he looks straight into the prince's eyes and holds his gaze, and because the latter can read faces he understands what Alyosha carries, "haven't you, Lev Nikolaevich? Is God's mercy so great that it extends to Judas?"

Myshkin nods without hesitation.

"For me," and he wishes he hadn't involved wine because it's all too soon and what he says might or might not have a fitting effect on his young and wounded comrade, "for me, the witness to my betrothed had to do with a little foot revealed from under the..."

Alyosha's mouth drops and he stands up suddenly.

"What?" he hisses.

No, no, Myshkin thinks. This was all too soon!

"A little foot?" Alyosha repeats in a high-pitched whine. "The little foot... Lise's mother and Rakitin's seduction around the little foot, one-hundred-fifty-thousand roubles so that Rakitin could live out the damnation Ivan had supposedly set out for him! How did Rakitin obtain so much information?" The young man clutches his locks, speaking quickly. "How did he distract Mitya the night before the case about little nerve ends on the brain being the only gods? A little foot..."

"Alexei?" Myshkin rises, seeing Alyosha go mad. "Please!"

But, Alyosha's run out of the café while the owner argues with the prince over the bill.

Through Montmartre's dark and winding night does Alyosha run, looking back and not seeing Myshkin, and then looking around in the dim lamplights seeing very strange bars and salons and even stranger characters. After a few minutes of realizing what he's done, and that he had stupidly taken a coincidence to an unreasonable degree with the prince, he tries to calm himself. However, our hero's too out of his element. Alyosha doesn't have another soul to turn to besides the prince, has no idea where Miusov lives, has left all his belongings back in Lev's house the location of which he can't configure. Nor can he make sense of the winding route he took, as he wanders about seeing that all the streets look the same and their names seem to repeat. He knows only silly French phrases which won't help him, while realizing that most of the people around him are drunk and mad or prostitutes very explicitly offering themselves to men -- including to himself. Who would understand him, much less help him?

While a group of hooligans harass him for money in loud French, he locates the scaffolding of the Basilique, but still can't orient himself regarding the turns he's made, the alleyways he's taken.

Then, he sees her. Alyosha sees Grushenka beneath a lamppost.

"No," he breathes.

Grushenka turns from him, caught, and hurries down some steps and to the left.

"Grusha! It can't be!" Alyosha chases her, pulling out of his way a man in the middle of some kind of poetry recitation to a group of onlookers. "Agrafena Alexandrovna! Grushenka! Why are you here!?"

Grushenka only runs more quickly, at a speed and with a mastery over these alleyways that astounds Alyosha as he sprints behind her and alarms all who see him. He pushes past people, even knocking one particular man over whom if he hadn't been flying so quickly most certainly would have brutally harmed him.

"Stop! STOP! How did you follow me!? GRUSHENKA, GOD HELP ME!"

Grushenka does stop, in the dark, and doesn't so much turn to him as her head tilts back and then lops off; then, her body twists unnaturally so that it turns in time to catch her own head as blood spews from the severed spine.

"You yourself as a young girl used to go to your gentlemen at dusk to get money, offering your beauty for sale, and I know it," the head pouring down blood speaks, just like it did to Katerina Ivanovna in the latter's parlor three years ago when Alyosha first met Grushenka, referring to Katya's honor-sacrifice toward Dmitri. "Alyoshenka, dear, come with me! I have something very, very nice to tell you on the way. I performed this scene for you, Alyoshenka. Come with me, darling, you'll be glad you did."

"Ivan, brother... see?" Alyosha's face breaks and contorts into sheer terror and urine runs down his leg. "See, brother, I went mad, too... you're not... alone, Vanya."

"So you were having dinner then," the head continues as the still-spewing body's shaky arms extend it forward, in the voice of Fyodor Pavlovich regarding Pyotr Alexandrovich frightening him with the legend of Dionysius the Areopagite, "and I just lost my faith!"

"Mamma!" Alyosha cries out as he wobbles and is about to fall. "Mamma, Vanya, Grigory Vasilievich!"

A strong hand takes hold of his and another masterfully coaxes his face to turn from the existent.

"Look away, Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov," Myshkin's voice is even, his presence a God-send to Alyosha. "Don't look nor let go of my hand; you'll be lured back into the trap if you do."

"W-who i-is tha-that?"

"'That' is not a 'who', not a person," assures the prince, sensing the existent come closer and staying intent on shielding Alyosha, "now, pray with me thrice the Prayer of the Heart, out loud, and don't falter once."

The two men pray, and their voices become like one. Alyosha no longer feels like falling, but still can't think. Our hero only holds onto Myshkin's hand and flows with the lulling prayer. Го́споди, Иису́се Христе́, Сы́не Бо́жий, поми́луй ны́. Góspody, Iisúse Christé, Sýne Bózhy, pomílui ný.

Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.

"Listen carefully while you look away: we're going to turn and run, as quickly as possible, and don't pause even if the world around you might look distorted."

"I... I can't run, I can barely move."

"Time is wasting!" Myshkin cries. "We only have to run two blocks! Now, promise me you won't stop nor look back."

"Two blocks?" Alyosha wants badly to open his eyes. "Where...?"

"Promise!"

"I promise."

"Now."

Alyosha doesn't know how, but, he's able to sprint as quickly as he did before and Myshkin actually drags at him. The streets are indeed distorted, as everyone and everything is moving at an alarmingly slow pace.

"What's happening?"

"Stay with me, Alexei! Look, there's my townhouse!"

Prince Myshkin pulls at the younger man with the strength of a horse.

"How!? I ran," Alyosha pants, pain shooting through him from strain and stress, "at least six or seven kilometers from the café which is just around the corner now!"

"You blindly ran through and meandered back and forth around a perimeter of three kilometers at most, but, I found help and then found the shortest path to you," Myshkin stops at the townhouse's steps and turns to face Alyosha, shining with love toward his friend who's on the verge of fainting, "because visible light that seeks the shortest distance between two points, like me, is an idiot."

The prince whispers a plea for peace and then kisses Alyosha's lips as though with a kind of magic, so that the latter instantly collapses in a calm unconscious into his arms.

"Aglaya!" Myshkin then calls out with a jovial tone feigning drunkenness, and though he feigns intoxication he's actually entirely drained. "Aglaya, ma chérie, aide-nous! Ah, désolé, désolé, Aglaya! Dorogaya, milaya, Aglaya! Haha!"

Some villagers look on, mostly disinterested, but some neighbors do indeed look out their window in voyeurism or disdain.

Aglaya Ivanovna steps out to the balcony and, throwing up her arms in frustration, begins berating Myshkin just as loudly as he was calling for her.

"You intoxicate your young exhausted cousin on the first night he arrives, you beast!" she yells in French and descends to open the front door of the townhouse and carry half of Alyosha's dead weight.

Alyosha remains completely unconscious, and if not for his even breath and his warmth Aglaya would think him dead. Immediately, she notices the smell of urine and adrenaline borne of terror.

Aglaya then repeats the same scolding in Russian, as though it's the language she and Lev Nikolaevich left behind once they'd come to Western Europe. Taking on most of Alyosha's weight, she shakes her head at the frowning faces from their windows. 

"Poor neighbors!" she insists in French. "Oh, would that they forgive you, Léon Myshkin, you idiot!"

"What an idiot I am," dopily agrees the prince as, once they've got Alyosha through the door and have begun carrying him up the stairs.

The landlord opens his door to look on.

"Oh, monsieur, forgive your stupid foreign tenant for wanting to celebrate his cousin coming all the way from St. Petersburg today, with the gift of vodka straight from the Motherland! Look at the state I put the poor lad into! And, so, please forgive our scandal and forgive Aglaya Ivanovna's wrath; I have to put up with it once we're behind locked doors."

The landlord, quite a forgiving gentleman of fifty, sighs and concedes so as not to further pester any neighbors -- though Montmartre is generally a neighborhood full more of pesterers than not -- to help the prince and Aglaya carry Alyosha up the stairs.

"Good God, but the youth is out cold, Monsieur Myshkin! And he pissed himself! Is this what Russian vodka does? Just how much did the boy bring and have you consumed it all?"

"Do you ask because you'd want to join the idiot in repeating this kind of spree, Monsieur Beaumont?" Aglaya quips, though with significant pathos. "I don't think you're like that!"

Once Myshkin and Aglaya thank Monsieur Beaumont for his help in dragging Alexei up to the third floor and onto one of the prince's living room sofas, and the landlord leaves, the pair drop their pretense.

"What happened?" Aglaya asks Myshkin in a hoarse voice, feeling Alyosha's clammy face. "What happened, my soul? In the time you flew to me and then brought me here to wait for you and him, I looked through his luggage like you said to," she gestures toward the room Alyosha had placed his luggage and would be his quarters, "and all I could find besides five hundred roubles, clothes and toiletries were an ikon of the Theotokos, the Holy Book and some letters from, at a quick glance, seem like they're from his eldest brother in the sham Zheltuga katorga."

The prince accepts a glass of water taken from a particular spring in France and kept reserved. After a deep breath, he drinks deeply and then sighs. Aglaya takes his hands and kisses them warm.

"Did you feel anything in those letters, Aglaya? Even in any of the clothes? In the pockets?" When Aglaya insists not, Myshkin asks, "And the ikon and the Bible, is there anything that might suggest they're warped?"

"I barely had time, but, not from what I could sense."

Aglaya again asks Myshkin to tell her what happened. Once the prince explains all that had been discussed and that transpired, Aglaya begins pacing.

"He still has Russia on him," Myshkin thinks aloud. "I'd have him fully bathed, but, his resting is more important, until he stirs and can drink some Lourdes water; in the meantime, I'll at least sponge away the urine with soap and put him into sleepwear."

"Lyova, forever Prince, you don't need this kind of evil, nor the expenditure of your magical abilities," Aglaya states, her lovely face scrunched up in deep disconcertment. "I can't see you become epileptic again, not when the Savior revealed what the purpose of those rays of light were for so as to glorify His Name! Shouldn't you call one of our friends, perhaps Père Pierre, to take him quietly away once the landlord's asleep, and place him on the train back to Russia tomorrow?"

Myshkin shakes his head, apologizing to Aglaya, procuring a bottle of holy water from the curio and picking up a rose from a bouquet on his table. Dousing the rose with the water, crossing himself in the Catholic way -- left to right -- he sprinkles it upon Aglaya and heavily upon the slumbering Alyosha.

"Do you remember a disturbed young and sick aristocrat arriving in Petersburg from Geneva after days of traveling, thinking himself blessed and lucky and yet yearning to take all onto himself, and beginning immediately to involve himself in 'karmic threads of others' (as we've learned from the Salon) just to end up causing disaster? Well," Prince Myshkin huffs self-deprecatingly, "this young man here isn't nearly as much a fool."

"Isn't he?"

"He just wants to save his brothers, where the fool still searches for Eternity, not being able to access that witch Blavatsky yet still trying to search out someone who will give him an answer."

"You sell yourself short, Lyova, for, you only want to help the Salon, who are harmless artists!" Aglaya curls her pretty lip. "This youth though he wants to help his brothers is more idiotic, I think, for whomsoever these brothers are -- needless to say along with their deceased half-brother and deceased father -- have surrounded him with a Mephistophelian spirit!"

"The coincidences between us point to our meeting being the Lord's will, not the machinations of any spirit or devil that would stalk around to divert and confound us," Myshkin concludes, sighing.

Looking up tenderly to his female companion, he asks, "Will you help me carry him into the toilet so I can clean him up and dress him, and help me take turns watching over him?"

Aglaya agrees, looking upon Alyosha as though trying to love him.

"Thank you," Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin rises and caresses the lovely woman's cheek still porcelain as it was thirteen years ago, "Princess Aglaya Ivanovna Myshkina."

Chapter Text

What it's like to be kissed, truly kissed.

Ah.

What is a kiss like? One that's between relatives? Those remind one, in the best sense, of tenderness and elders and siblings and your own children rocking you to and fro as though back in the womb, and, at worst, of slobbering hypocrisy. One that's between friends? The Paraclete may be in these, of course. Lustful kisses are also hypocritical, mocking, wicked.

But.

A kiss in which two people hold each other's souls in breath, that kind is divine. And the closest sensation to such a kiss has been, for Alyosha, his kisses with Ivan. Though not incestuous (such a thing! could such a thing even be considered? Lord save us from horror...) and therefore having no eros the two have held each other's souls, beginning with their simulation of Christ tried by the Grand Inquisitor in Sevilla of the Reconquista. Sevilla of the Rebellion. Sevilla of the Revolution. Sevilla Trianera de la Raza Calé, at its most frank. They've kissed like that often since, especially as a healing aid on the part of Alyosha to his brother, like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Not everyone experiences such a bond. Evolution, that serpent that perpetually wiggles, diverts Ivan's and Alyosha's kisses from ever awakening either man entirely to the uncreated light of Mt. Tabor. It's always been possible, but Ivan was always meant to marry Katerina Ivanovna. With her he was always meant to share not only such dazzlingly dark kisses -- actually, very many -- but also share in eros.

Eros.

Eros, the baser of the three loves of the Greeks and the subsequent followers of Christ: érōs, philía and agápē. Three sisters. Better, three brothers. Three gods, even, or movements of God -- this is found in certain religions to which Prince Myshkin has been exposed and dares to now ponder.

The fertile, the orderly, and the self-emptying. 

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Here is fertility. Here is faith that to receive implies a loss, and to bear loss is to live in joy. Oh, to live! This love is virtuous and presents the beauty of desire, the beauty of flesh and blood. Who's to say which came first, the stomach or the brain? Does the brain serve to find means for the stomach, or did the brain invent a means to maintain itself in time and space through absorbing and so killing plants and animals? Is there such certain Knowledge? Adam fell, tempted by Eve, who heard the sound wave from the wiggling serpent to consume the fruit, and the Knowledge is overwhelming if not received through sacrament.

Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Here is love in order. Here is equanimity, the binary, a miasma in which every dew drop on a spider's web reflects every other dew drop which in turn reflects every other one, which means this love possesses nothing. This love in hatred, points away. Always away, so that you firmly suspend. This love is just and presents the world of spirit, of mind (or nous), of principles and measurements. Defined already is the theory that just because light reveals itself to minimize within time and space, doesn't imply that light did so without knowing all paths and therefore emitting said paths. Light emits, but darkness precedes it, which brings us to the third brother.

If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him. Here is kénōsis, self-emptying. Here is the secret of "I AM," the name of God revealed in the dark flames Moses saw in the bush and the dark flames of Elijah's chariot and the dark flames made even more splendid upon Tabor, the secret revealing that all things return but yet never possess the same essence. This love balances the other two. For, how can two be one without three? The senses know this. Logic begs for it. There is only something because there's nothing, one because of nil, and what follows after this binary is the sequence until all returns to the one.

You may have one sphere in space. But, with two, you know "sphereness." A third sphere will reveal perpetual relationship, hence perpetual movement, hence the question of "where." Toward where is everything moving? Toward nowhere, toward one, toward consciousness. The monks and mystics of the pagan Far East have intuited this return. But, they have not the Resurrection yet. For them, the form (the Son) has not descended to the root of the image (the Father) and has not therefore become a progenitor. Son becomes Father, or, rather, image honors form. Here, fire and water do not extinguish each other, nor does air lack against solid. That's spirit, or consciousness, made holy.

Three types, three lessons, three persons.

Eros, then, may sometimes be higher than self-emptying. Ask one who makes love to the person his soul is bound to.

And a fourth? What of sterility, disorder and a serpent that devours its own tail? What of the necessity of evil? What of death, offal, waste, stink, putrefaction, malady, bacteria, infection, virus, genetic deformity? What of the chaos of droughts, storms, quakes, volcanos, tornados, frosts, glacial melting, accidents? What of errors? What kind of wave particles did the serpent emit to convince Eve to sin and therefore be submitted to her husband while he ordered the earth? While they bore sons who bore more sons and daughters, who built up Babel so that lightning would strike it, so that wasted seed and menstrual blood and Nephilim would prompt God to reverse the parting waters? And yet, Noah still sinned most heinously!

"Vanya..."

"Hm? Baby Lyosha!"

"Vanya, forgive me."

"What is it? Where," Ivan pauses, for it's dusk in Father's garden, and Dmitri all the way over there in a bush and Smerdyakov from behind a tree are along with him and Alyosha all watching Fyodor Pavlovich stare out the window, "are we? When? Oh!" After assessing the environment, the young intellectual grips Alexei's bicep. "Oh! This is the moment!"

"We're in the Garden of..." Alyosha breaks off his whisper, faint, and he might sweat blood. "Vanechka, I spied the killer once in this Garden playing music to a girl; he was singing in melisma and playing a kithára, the guitarra. Music is the sound wave that only Eve could hear from the serpent!"

The seventy-two returned with joy and said, "Lord, even the demons submit to us in Your name."

So He told them, "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Behold, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy. Nothing will harm you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven."

"Would you turn from Judas' kiss?" Alyosha breathes, looking at Ivan in the still autumn night. "Judas, possessed by the falling star, the lightning flash named Satan rattling his whole body with electric currents, who would then hang himself thinking it his fate?"

Vanya shakes his head, solemnly, emerald eyes confident.

"I wouldn't turn this time, brother, but, would you know what Judas' kiss is like if it came upon your mouth?"

"No!" Alyosha cries out with a tongue tasting like wine and Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin's soul. "No, the Prince can't! He won't!"

"I will secretly commission a tombstone for Smerdyakov and place on it the name Pavel Fyodorovich Karamazov," Ivan promises, ignoring Alyosha's cries, because they're now at Sofia Ivanovna Karamazova's grave, "and I'll pray he too meets us again, but only promise that you will empty yourself in true love."

Into Alyosha's hands he presses a gold chalice, smiling, "for gold is more precious to us than the silver of Joseph, and it's fit for the Blood of the Lamb -- don't reveal my identity as your trickster yet, just empty yourself like this vessel." 

Agrafena Alexandrovna will dance later tonight at Mokroye as she's encouraged by the Roma gypsies, the tsygane, as she kisses Dmitri on the lips rather than merely submit him to kissing her little foot. This kiss of love will be encouraged by a midnight-eyed Roma gypsy who wishes joy and fine wine for the muzhiks as though he were Christ in Cana assuring that the best be given to the worst... encouraged by one who has the kithára running through his blood, the guitarra and the melismatic song of a clairvoyant lineage said to be fated to wander from a land of secret knowledge and witness the invisible wherever those of the lineage go...

Son, Zov, of Karama... Kalām... Kālī-Mā... Mā, Māyā, Mātā.

Son of Kalāmā.

"Son of the Mother of Time's Destruction!" Myshkin exclaims in fright from some faraway land to a woman who softly keens in thought. Alyosha hears the two voices speak of "Sanskrit," and "Bengal" and very strange words he's never heard, like nāmarūpa, Durgā, Pārvatī, Śiva, śakti, Navarātram, saṃsāra, karma and kaliyuga.

Ilyusha and Alyosha will indeed meet again along with Kolya and the boys. Father, Mother, Pavel Fyodorovich. Again and again, and then again and again, and it will be new and different. It will not be man's will but that of the Heavenly Father's. 

At Cana, while the guests whirl in dance, Alyosha grips the Elder's hand and begs forgiveness for wanting wine, for being afraid, for his accidents, for clinging.

"For my tendency... my... menstrual blood."

"Menstrual blood, dear one?" Elder Zosima frowns. 

"Elder..." Alyosha rolls up his eyes in drunkenness like the kind Noah so unhappily fell into, "après le déluge, the blood I'm finding spilling out of my heart is not martyr's blood but the lunar waste of the woman in me, and I... I am an androgyne, aren't I? Double-sexed -- bisexual -- I'm not sure of the exact term."

The Elder has left. The succubus returns, to the back-alleys Mitya used to rave about. Alexei bucks up into her infected slit which has opened to so many reptile-brained men, the secret wound which had once been like a blooming lotus. It's his own soul's opening, his own wretched orifice from which spills in time with the moon the lament of not bearing fruit. And, he's about to spill wasted semen -- which he understands would only produce monsters anyway -- when Myshkin's hand presses forcefully on his chest.

"Kill me!" Alyosha cries as he wakes from the dream, erection throbbing. With the alarmed prince, he struggles not to jump out of the bed. From deep in his subconscious, he speaks like Grigory had years back about his six-toed son who didn't survive: "I'm a dragon!"

"What? -- No, you wouldn't have responded so well!" cries back Myshkin, laughing despite his nerves. "Be at peace, Alexei Fyodorovich; lay back, easily, easy, God be with you, you did so well against something very frightening and vile."

Alyosha falls back onto the pillow and sobs out the way Vanya has tended to in these past three years and how Grusha and Katya do, and how he remembers his mother doing so.

"What's happening to me!?"

The youngest Karamazov looks desperately to the prince in the morning's light.

"Who are you, really, and what do you want?"

Chapter Text

"Who am I and what do I want?" Myshkin breathily laughs. "Dear friend, say how many details might calm your heart! Nevertheless, yes, it's fitting you should know, Alexei Fyodorovich, as long as you'd concede not rushing into explanations of the existent we witnessed. Explaining it takes time, forgive me."

The prince's tone bears no scorn as he asks, "can you be patient?"

Alyosha sips his second cup of tea, softly moaning at the sweet heat. Myshkin and he sit at the former's dining table, just finishing together a breakfast consisting of fresh bakery bread with quince and soft cheese. The characteristic French doors open to a small balcony overlooking an alley which permits certain pockets of sunlight to beam down, and the warm and fragrant early June morning air fills the apartment. A newsboy down below is calling out headlines, one of which regards the outbreak of pogroms occuring in Russia over the last few weeks since Tsar Alexander III's ascent to his murdered father's thone.

"Please believe that I can be patient, Lev Nikolaevich," Alyosha softly remarks, eyes averted, "except that it would certainly ease my mind to know what the existent appeared as to you versus me," his eyes raise to Myshkin's, "and determine whether the appearance was similar."

A sharp breath from the prince suppresses within him a shudder. Nevertheless, his reply is even-toned.

"I perceived a walking version of the subject of Hans Holbein's portrait of the Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb: a putrefied corpse of a bared young man with Christ's characteristic wounds."

Alyosha doesn't miss Myshkin's sour implication that Holbein's so-called Christ is not at all reflective of Christ. The putrefied body.

Oh, putrefaction.

Myshkin looks to the open doors and listens to the newsboy call out "anti-Semitism in Russia," and "the anti-Zionist theory," until Alyosha reveals his vision of Grushenka, whose role in his life and his family's he'd already explained to the prince. The vision in particular, he explains, involved Fyodor Pavlovich and Miusov before the Elder Zosima abusing their speaking privilege by carrying on about Montmartre and the Areopagite. Fyodor Pavlovich had mocked the holy monk and this only a few mere days before the death of the latter. Zosima's death had inadvertently prompted Alyosha's life-altering Cana-dream.

"Speaking of last night's experience out loud makes it sound ridiculous, except that it was undoubtedly something I can't mistake for a dream or even a hallucination."

Myshkin hums in agreement, reminding him with an empathetic glance of his own bouts of madness.

"Would you want to know about the dream I had once I fell into your arms?" Alyosha ducks his head, blushing, embarrassed. "Wouldn't it be right that you know, given that I fell ill and perverse towards the end of it to which you helped me? Forgive me, Lyova, again, for I'm ashamed to have brought this burden to you, you who've been most gracious and who've revealed extraordinary abilities confronting evils and this through holy prayer and," he can't help smile, "and the kiss of peace!"

Smiling back like a youth, Myshkin insists Alyosha determine whether it be right to reveal his dreaming. As he already has since the latter recovered from his sobbing and could be coaxed to take a warm bath and have breakfast, he insists his aid was sincere and nothing Alyosha's brought to him -- nothing of his person -- is a burden.

"Well, then." Alyosha nods. "It should wait, and thank you, and please tell me what you find fitting I should know."

Upon the young former-monk's insistence, Myshkin begins by mentioning Alyosha's commitment to save his brothers.

"Upon my healing in Geneva, I also wished to heal and help my brother who was trapped in the inferno of the Kara katorga."

"You... your brother? You have a brother," Alyosha stops spreading quince jam on his bread and raises his brows, "in the Kara mines?"

"Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin is not my brother by blood, but by heart." Myshkin clears his throat after a sip of tea and a genial gesture that Alyosha eat and drink as much more as he'd like. "This brother is the one whose fate I sealed back in Petersburg in the years '67 and '68 when the crisis took place by my manipulations in his life's, eh, 'karma'... that term meaning the emphasis upon which he placed on certain persons and ideas. As a result of my maniacal games madness took him and compelled him to murder my betrothed -- this despite and even due to how bound we were to one another and still are."

Alyosha listens with a subdued mind but one nevertheless highly keen, and he witnesses Myshkin reach under his shirt and around to the back of his neck to remove a gold chain.

"I returned from my own madness, three years later, to face my guilt for such trespassing, for the solipsistic warping of the abilties I'd always been granted by God which resulted in epilepsy when abused."

Lev shows Alexei the relic at the end of the chain: a finely engraved gold crucifix, adding, "and Rogozhin kept to my knowledge the Byzantine eight-pointed tin one I'd bought for twenty kopecks from a drunkard on the street of a provincial town I'd once visited while aimlessly mounting the railways -- I don't remember which town it was, it may well have been your Skotoprigonyevsk -- strung with a blue ribbon."

Myshkin describes his betrothed murdered by his soul-brother, the hopeless Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova, who'd made an ikon of him: "not only did I permit her such idolatry out of pity because she'd been wounded in girlhood, I stepped into an ikon of Antichrist to lead her to a man pleading for God to control his violent urges, to my Rogozhin! And, I speared through their minds so as to skewer them together with violence! And then, oh, then I went off to play Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette -- forgive the reminder of beheading, dear Lyosha, and understand that it too has haunted me and for longer than I can remember -- to play cruel infantile games of hedonistic royals with the young petulant Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchin, daughter of a renowned General and my cousin Lizaveta Prokofyevna! Aglaya who..."

At this point, the prince rises and swiftly from his curio retrieves a pipe into which he stuffs some tobacco leaves and lights it while he strides to the open doors. 

"Aglaya Ivanovna helped me help you enter here last night."

Alyosha watches the older man while still holding the golden crucifix, and he also eyes the open curio.

"Forgive this idiot, Alexei." Lev explains it's been some time since he's smoked, but that he'd had a premonition that he might need to upon Alyosha's arrival. Pointing to the curio, he insists, "I've another pipe if you'd yourself like to smoke; it's quality grade."

"I'd better not, Prince," Alyosha admits, averting his eyes again, "but, thank you all the same."

Shutting his celestial eyes after another drag, Myshkin says, "Aglaya Ivanovna helped me wash you and watch over you through the night."

The prince swallows, hard.

"Aglaya lives in her own quarters, not far away, and according to civil law she's my spouse; but, since we've not consummated the marriage then according to the divine law (and the sacrament was indeed performed here through the Roman Catholic Church) we're not husband and wife."

Alexei rapidly blinks, mind whirring. The woman's voice in his dream... Yes, there had indeed been a woman here last night.

"...Oh?"

"We entered a celibate marriage because she needed the protection my title could offer, as well as my friendship and commitment, given that I'd recovered." The prince continues, tone distant, gazing down to the street from the balcony, "me, her 'poor knight,' is who she needed to rescue her from a man she'd married who'd prompted her to reject her aristocratic family and pivot toward Catholicism, but who so terribly wronged her that she was able to canonically annul him as her husband: he was some lying scheming Pole feigning nobility just so he could exploit her dowry."

Alyosha motions that Myshkin hand him his pipe, which the latter obliges. Mildly, he breathes in the smoke and exhales to feel its tingle.

"A lying, cheating and abusive Pole," the younger man sighs and tilts his head back to avoid vertigo, "stole her away for her money? Your marriage to the Princess Aglaya is one not consummated, but, bound in trust."

Myshkin doesn't miss the marvel in Alyosha's tone, suggesting familiarity with a phenomenon like the one mentioned. But, the latter humbly prompts the former to continue, handing the pipe back.

"When nearly a year had passed after I'd arrived in Petersburg, I found myself shoved romantically by Nastasya Filippovna toward Aglaya Ivanovna and then the reverse, and then I was pulled back by Aglaya and then also the reverse, and the two female imps said they were in love with each other." The prince shakes his head and looks for sympathy in Alyosha's eyes, of which the latter does possess. "On our very wedding day before her ride to the church where I waited, Nastasya hurtled toward Parfyon who did not know how to stop his murderous compulsion: I myself 'witnessed' the end before it happened and I did nothing, passive wretch that I was, Antichrist that I was! Because the truth is that I couldn't bear these feminine dances and was in love with Rogozhin, for all that he was so different than me, so swept in the flow of time, so human, so impassioned and strained and wanting for war, and so desirous of God to possess him!"

The prince stops pacing and turns to Alyosha, with a puff of smoke.

"I am the dragon, Alyosha," Myshkin confides, and on the tip of his tongue is the addition "a homosexual" but that term doesn't seem quite right and so he doesn't say it.

Alyosha shakes his head with alarming confidence. At this point, he seems like the older man between the two of them.

"No, Lyova; continue, please, dear."

Rogozhin, Myshkin describes, used the knife the prince had mischievously asked him to consider as a murder weapon -- and which was in fact going to be used against Myshkin earlier in the story, before Rogozhin saw the pinnacle of his power in the form of an epileptic fit -- used the knife to masterfully pierce Nastasya's heart. "Like the Carmelite reformer St. Teresa of Ávila's statue in Rome, of her ecstasy as her heart is speared by an angel."

Nastasya's corpse, naturally, was hidden behind curtains and covered with a blanket like a veil. Rogozhin had "pierced her" in place of Myshkin, and he was never to pierce her more than once, her life over forever. In that sense, Myshkin was beaten by the stronger aggressor. 

"But, neither of us wished to gaze upon the dead female form, for, at the time we sensed something only chauvinists do: what dead woman is ever ugly? Rogozhin and I had, months earlier, exchanged crosses after we'd marveled at the putrid dead image Holbein offered as divine, for my brother inherited from his father a replica of the painting which he kept in his house, and Nastasya's corpse would have compelled him to kill me right there as well, which admittedly I at the time wasn't too frightened of."

All Myshkin saw of his murdered betrothed was a portion of her foot which poked out from the blanket, "and then, I laid down with my rival, my twin, and let him take my soul out from my mouth with kisses until my tears became his;" he points to his well-formed lips, blue-blood that he is, and Alyosha can taste him again as he receives the pipe from him and puts it to his mouth; "until the police arrived."

The older man then coldly describes delirium the likes of which he can't recall in a way that would make sense. Then, he claims, at some point during his internment in a rehabiliation center in Geneva financed by a friend Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky, Paris arrived.

"The Salon de la Croix D'Or," he calls the group of philosophers, esotericists, occult magicians, healers, artists, Catholics, almost Masonic but certainly not, almost Jewish in the Orthodox rabbinic tradition, and sympathetic to socialism though decidely believers.

"A gentleman of brilliant mind and noble soul, Jacques Férradan, spoke to me during my catatonia of a Christian reality in which my epilepsy and disposition toward madness is meant to unfurl rather than to converge and constrict into Babel (or, Faust's fixed Heaven)! I slowly awoke, learning that my condition was restricting the cosmos' divine perpetual movement: that I was grasping at space and time, particularly time."

Lightning fits which gently unfurl, the prince describes, place time so quantitatively in his responsibility that he's able to and indeed called to hinder prowling spirits from ruining souls, "and, under divine authority, I meet them and trick them so as to divert their attaching to people."

"Did you -- can you -- slow down time?" Alyosha murmurs, innocent and rapt. "Is that what you did last night?"

"No, Alyosha," Myshkin laughs, shaking his head, "I'm not the Lord, no! Listen, last night I tempted the spirit harassing you to perceive time more slowly -- all spirits are outside of space and time, anyway, and the evil ones become easily confused by person who obey the will of God -- and so due to our encounter with the spirit yours and my very own perception was affected and we moved at a speed which would normally seem impossible."

The term for this divine ability is often called bilocation, moving with the speed of a spirit, the speed that overcomes the epileptic not yet aware of the gifts at his disposal given him by God. 

"It's for those with the falling sickness that I've trusted the Salon to be worshipping God by exploring natural mysteries in congruence with the Church's development," the prince argues, "including our native Church! I've been baptized Roman Catholic but do not believe that it detracs from my Orthodoxy."

Myshkin frowns, torn within by his own crisis.

"It's for those like me that I contribute to the Salon's experiments, so that I may help those suffering such states, those like your deceased half-brother who was named and treated like he was offal."

Alyosha rises from his seat as though in a contemplative state, nodding in understanding. Thoughtlessly, he wanders to the curio. 

The Salon, Myshkin explains, knew of the famous Karamazov case in the village by Staraya Russa, for it reached much of the nation for all its odd factors. The case based itself in the orphaned and ignorant tsygane brothers, those in the Salon said, born of various abused mothers who died quickly after their births. They never knew, and it's possible their father couldn't be precisely sure (as his drinking sprees suppressed memories of his childhood), that they were descendants of the Roma.

The group knew of the staretz Elder Zosima using sacred magic to command Alexei Fyorodorich into the world, Alexei who carries upon him a seal which only the highly trained may see. It knew of his full-blooded brother Ivan Fyodorovich's pact with an Andalusian Mephistopheles, who harassed him, and did so similarly to how Lev Nikolaevich's spirit had also once harassed him into hating Loyola and actually captivated his soul with temporal currents back in '68 at the fated Ephanchin's party with Princess Belokonsky. It knew of the eldest of the Karamazov brothers Dmitri Fyodorovich's saintly love for nature and muzhiks ("as though St. Francis were standing trial in Russia!"). And, it knew of the most haunted brother Pavel Fyodorovich who from wicked ideas planted into him from infancy did not comprehend how beautiful he was and so turned the most hideous in many ways.

There is nothing coincidental about the case, nothing that doesn't involve the abilities inherited by families like that of Alexei's.

"Those of your race are of clairvoyants, of cartomancers!" Myshkin gestures as though he were holding playing cards, and he trembles. "Nastasya Filippovna also had this race within her, the mysterious wandering people from Bharat, and Rogozhin took her to God as though he were a god and all I could think when I returned to my senses was to rescue him from the Hades of the mines! The Salon moved to fulfill that wish."

The prince's eyes flash like some tropical blue ocean splash.

"Hence why I mentioned the gold in the Andes of Latin America, because my brother lives there now not as a prisoner but a guardian against Protestant American capitalism, as an ally to the new nation and as part of a potential Russian alliance! And, so, I return to my original statement, my darling Karamazov, of the question of rescuing your brothers!"

Alyosha has extracted from the curio, with a picaresque smile, a fine case within which sits a lovely Spanish guitar.

Myshkin walks over to where Alyosha sits hypnotized in tuning the guitar, and kneels before him. The latter has never touched a guitar in his life, though seeing him now one would never doubt he has. For a moment, both men are silent with only the tuning strings sounding along with the newsboy who's returned to continue calling out for the public to purchase news about the pogroms in Russia

"There is no katorga in Zheltuga, my soul," Lev whispers, caressing Alyosha's cheek, an action to which the latter winks with the wisdom of the ages. "Don't you know? It's an experiment, secretive and orchestrated by the faithless, and Dmitri Fyodorovich will undoubtedly be killed once its results are obtained and the simulation of a 'random discovery of gold by a peasant' carried out; and, so, give yourself to me, to the Salon, to save him, to save Ivan Fyodorovich from falling back into the spells and harming Katerina Ivanovna Karamazova, to save Pavel Fyodorovich from Hades! Can't you -- mystic, hermit, artist, lover -- still fulfill your Elder's oath? Access your magic like I have mine!"

"If I have magic and I'm descended from the tsygane, am half Roma, as you imply, and as I heard you say regarding my surname's possible Sanskrit roots," Alyosha plucks the strings of the guitar so as to soothe Myshkin's soul, "wouldn't that feed a dangerous theory that certain races possess qualities others don't, and that we're not all formed in the image of the Lord?"

"Gene designs carry memories, proven by isolated science and by natural wisdom." Myshkin helps Alyosha with the higher E string. "What was my weakness became my strength, and so it is with all; what we perceive as strengths, intellectual or physical, are often our paths toward self-complacency and our rejection of God."

"You are royalty lest you forget, Your Grace," Alyosha reminds, wide-set eyes soft and a little sad, "and I am just a little more than a peasant.

Just a schoolmaster is he, Alexei describes, in a farming village with a renowned monastery of which he's spiritually bound no longer to enter, the last-born of a criminal family whose land-owning contracts have mostly all dissolved due to blood-stained reputation, with only his recently-recovering brother living with him in the same house within which their poor disowned half-brother killed their father and then himself, with his two servants who stay only out of loyalty; his eldest brother is in a gold-mine labor-camp which is, according to the prince, apparently a kind of sinister experiment by certain powers-that-be, and nevertheless Dmitri suffers daily inhumane conditions and despair of the heart.

"Perhaps the Salon's tsygane theory on us Karamazovs holds weight, but, then my task would now be to detach from these identities in order to help you and, apparently, Mitya, Vanya and the soul of Smerdyakov."

"Yes!" Myshkin is renewed, eyes always wide, always witnessing. "Learning the ties is part of releasing them."

Alyosha hums as he plucks and strums.

"Dmitri is bound to Grushenka, and, I wouldn't imagine that his escape would need so much planning since his love is guiding him."

Sighing, he reminds Lev of the original plan for his eldest brother to have escaped to the United States.

"I hate thinking that humanity plans such vile secretive experimentation, as you've posited is what's happening in Zheltuga... and yet... oh, how the serpent does wiggle! How it wiggled, Lyova, my Prince! How the serpent curved within us all..."

Vanka left Jerusalem
Followed him did Katerina
Cana's vessels all are new,
Would it that you'd seen her!

Do all that He says, ah,
Do all that He says
I would do all that He says,
In gold and pearls would that you had seen her!

At such pleasantry in sound waves, such discovery of magic until now alien -- ah, the feeling of sadness and relief -- both men softly laugh and bring their faces closer.

"Time, oh," Alyosha flutters lashes down, while leaning and testing the small space between his breath and the other man's, the man he's fallen in love with, and little grins play on both their mouths, "what a task is the witness of time..."

Time is the current that allows for the darkness to slip, only once and just this little bit for now, eyes closed, gently like the stars, and a butterfly kiss lands between the prince and the alleged tsygan. Warm, fruitful, smoky. Open, just a little. And, a breath. And, another. And, then, empty. And then a kiss, and another. Just enough to know the where.

Time and memory. When the body remembers. Oh, there's been pain and fracture, such that lasts lifetimes, and blossoms of wounds that pour out élan vital. It frenzies all the flesh left of the æon's boys with boundless despair. The æon leaves so many boys out dead, inside dead, still going. So many, too many, yes, too many to bear.

Ah. But, now's a kiss. One that saves, hm. A kiss that begins everything, and in fertile eros. Doesn't one remember? Doesn't one return? Here, a return. A return to his lips. A revelation. How did one know?

"I've been bou-- No, I bind myself!" A deeper kiss, eyes to eyes. "You bind me! Together."

"Together..."

Who wrote us? begs this kiss. Who writes the poems, the spells, the romans, the evangels? Who writes fate?

How did anybody know?

I was there. And, I'm not the type to lie.

Chapter Text

One must regard the previous night from the perspectives of those living in Skotoprigonyevsk near Staraya Russa, and a word from Zheltuga begs to be revealed.

First, Zheltuga: Dmitri had naturally been recalling that fateful day in Elder Zosima's cell when brother Ivan impressed all those present with his article of how the state should ascend and become church. Civil law should deify, through mankind's judgment, and subsequently every man's judgment should be law. How contrasting to Ascension Thursday (around which Dmitri regrets not informing Alyosha in his letter that he's also been pondering). How the Lord consumed His mild fish and sweet honeycomb before ascending, exclaiming questions as to why the disciples should be so surprised to see Him in flesh and blood, especially Thomas in John's Gospel! The disciples were to stay in Jerusalem and await the descent of the Paraclete. The mysteries regarding the relationship of the Trinity are a bit too overwhelming for Dmitri Fyodorovich without discussing them with his younger brothers in person: with Ivan on politics and the metaphysics of morals so as to "eradicate Euclid and Kant from the rotted mind" as the young man had written in a letter last year to Dmitri on a lucid day when he could bear writing to him without collapsing in despair, and with the patient Alyosha on mysticism and Scriptural analogy. Jerusalem and honeycomb, though: these remind him of the Song of Solomon.

Ah, Solomon and his Queen of Sheba! The Queen who would search through Jerusalem in that strange state between wakefulness and sleep.

"Say, what do you suppose the Chinese here on the border and the nearby Japanese believe?" Mitya asks a prisoner-comrade on the eve of Ascension Thursday before they fall asleep. "Do -- do you think the Lord's revealed many secrets to them that might aid the Christian faith? Are they entirely devoid of grace?"

"Oh, yes, they are strange."

"Stranger than Jews?"

His comrade chuckles.

"I speak like this after reading so many stories in Scripture, God help me!" Dmitri innocently laughs. "I mean, to the Chinese and Japanese, our books must seem quite fantastical and contradictory, in the same way we'd perceive their beliefs! They value this gold we're mining just as much as Jews, and Zheltuga right by these Oriental nations doesn't add up at all to what greater Russia claims the katorgas are like!"

Mitya is no fool, for he knows his comrade's presence here is due to involvement in certain insurrections against the tsar before his assassination, and the eldest Karamazov seeks to glean as much from his fellow prisoners as he can without ruffling them.

"The Japanese are advancing in technology at a terribly rapid speed," the man remarks, "and all I know is that they're renouncing their feudal and folkloric ways for a nature-worship in which they understand violence as a kind of divine simulation of thermodynamic power."

"How intelligent you are, how like a darling of my heart," Dmitri remarks, being vague about said darling being brother Ivan.

"Oh?"

"Hm, yes." Dmitri pivots: "Imagine the Chinese and Japanese learning -- and they must have, when the Jesuits arrived centuries ago," there's Ivan's lectures coming out again from Mitya's memory, for he always paid attention, "imagine them learning of the riches of Solomon, for example, and the caravans of gold and treasure."

"And, Solomon's seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines," the man adds, as though he's well aware of Scripture himself.

"The devil take it, what man on earth even if he be the son of King David needs seven hundred wives!?" Dmitri scowls. "Seven hundred, that's right!" Alyosha would here make an allegory that would make the number and the meaning of 'wives' in the spiritual context make sense to Mitya. "What would you do with seven hundred women?"

"I don't know."

"Just imagine what a man would do with a seventh of that portion: merely one hundred wives." 

"..."

"Ten concubines, perhaps, he might find contentment in," Mitya concedes, nodding. "Ten concubines is reasonable against three hundred, I'd imagine."

"And how many wives?" quips the other prisoner with a lecherous smile.

Dmitri Fyodorovich sighs and, with a kind of grace -- grace translates in Greek to Agrafena, after all -- insists on one.

"All is one in God," he murmurs, settling into his infernally uncomfortable cot and resting his aching back. "In the charity of love given by God, two lovers become one flesh, and I've no idea about seven hundred."

"Huh."

After a moment, Dmitri mumbles before falling into dreams, "and what of the Hindus...? The 'caste' system and returning to life as another? Such rivers, mountains, jungles, flora and spices, such mysteries... Imagine a Bengal tiger or a peacock or an elephant! ...Don't they worship a god with the head of an elephant? And in such strange temples! Such mysteries, Grusha, such music and dance and silks and jewels..."

"South America is mysterious like that, too," Mitya's comrade unexpectedly mutters from his own cot.

On that note we return to Skotoprigonyevsk. Since Ivan Fyodorovich's and Katerina Ivanovna's wedding on Sunday the couple had not fulfilled their conjugal responsibility. This shouldn't seem unusual. All things considered, before the fifth of June, the third-born of the four Karamazov brothers had for nearly three years and for all intents and purposes lived as an invalid.

Ivan is only accustomed to taking thirty to forty minute walks around town most days with weather permitting, and sometimes instead he'll merely ride carriages to ease some paranoiac bouts. The rest of his time continues in his laying about in meditation. The young sleeps a great deal, and he eats moderately though avoiding heavy meats and much egg and dairy. Most certainly he steered clear of liquor. To his virtue, he often participates in aiding Katerina, Grushenka and Marfa in meal preparation, for Smerdyakov's recipe books remain and Katerina and Alyosha a year ago devised a plan for their little family to learn and perfect the culinary arts as long as monthly expenses allowed for the ingredients. Ivan is like Smerdyakov in his precise measurements and deft skill with the organic, like a chemist, and meals always taste better when he cooks.

Our intellectual hero spends much time writing academic articles on history, philosophy, theology and some science that will never publish but that nevertheless bring him satisfaction under most circumstances. A majority of them contain trails that lead to confusing conclusions, revealing the remainders of the man's psychosis. Ivan also, like he'd always had before the crisis, writes many clear and rather poignant tales and poetry based on legends and myths. Katerina reads many things to him. All kinds of literature he begs for, and he loves teaching Katya extra information and especially loves when her eyes alight in sudden comprehension. No kind of literature, however, is he ever read with graphically violent, morbid or nihilistic content; he'd abandoned the vice of collecting criminal cases with Katya's help and also Alyosha's. Kolya frequents the house, and sometimes while talking to Ivan he'll mischievously prod him with horror-classified anecdotes. When caught red-handed by Katerina upon seeing Ivan growing pale while veering into mania, the woman usually chases a laughing Kolya away; Alexei, instead, usually sighs and harrumphs in a way that makes the boy pivot to another kind of story-telling. The more severe aspects of Vanya's mental illness remain dormant unless distressed by certain factors such as talk of violence, war, the sinister side of the supernatural and of anything pertaining to Fyodor Pavlovich's murder or Smerdyakov's suicide or whiffing any hints within any of Dmitri's letters that his brother is suffering.

The manor itself has slightly changed since Fyodor Pavlovich's death and Dmitri's exile: with the money from their inheritance, Ivan and Alyosha have had the main bedroom's floorboards replaced and the walls repainted and papered and all the furniture and curtains sold for new ones. Nothing of Fyodor's essence nor any reminder of his murder remains except the ikons. Due to the stark difference between his trauma and that of Ivan's, Alyosha sleeps in this bedroom and rather calmly except for the occasional nightmare. The young man honors his father's ikons but also the ones given him by Father Paissy which used to belong to Zosima. Close by, in the deceased patriarch's old study, also refurnished and with simple unadorned hazelnut wood bedroom furniture, with the walls also redone (though the floorboards remain), sleeps Ivan. Ivan's bed rests close to the large window so that he can gaze out at the garden and daily record the progress of the flora, the sticky buds. Upon his walls are also mounted some ikons donated by Paissy and also Lise, and of which he's grown more fond as time passes.

Agrafena Alexandrovna, no longer called 'creature' by Katerina Ivanovna, has her quarters in one of the upstairs bedrooms. In fact, it's the one Ivan had occupied during his stay years ago with Fyodor Pavlovich. Grushenka keeps to herself, for, it's merely her way; even if it weren't, Katya's constant presence keeps her confined to her room and to running daily errands while her former rival keeps watch over Ivan downstairs.

There's a curious detail in the house which only Ivan and Alexei appreciate and, quite frankly, only truly understand. A second-rate replica of a Gustave Moreau painting, one which Lise had pointed out to Alyosha in the market one day in autumn of '79 and which the latter immediately purchased for twenty-five roubles, hangs in the small hallway dividing the brothers' bedrooms. On the day Alyosha brought it home to show Ivan, the former received from the latter the reaction he hoped for and one in which he himself indulged: mad laughter.

"For Mitya!"

"Yes, for when he returns and sees! So that…" Alyosha had caught his breath, "he sees that his doppelgänger was always here between us!"

The brothers had fallen over each other cackling, appearing as though drunk and alarming Lise.

"Oh, darling, the Greek is all of us of the male sex," Ivan had wisely and yet sadly murmured to the girl, winking at the assenting Alexei, and had then resumed his jolly laughter.

Katerina Ivanovna when faced that same day with the painting had grown scandalized at Alyosha's seeming irreverence and then refused to look at it for several months until she began pondering uncomfortable truths. Agrafena Alexandrovna upon hearing the portrait's title the next day and seeing it had heatedly demanded from Ivan and Alexei an explanation until Alyosha reassured her on the portrait's display being one of playful humor and that it neither implicated nor mocked Dmitri nor herself and especially not maliciously.

The Moreau replica is of his wild "Oedipus and the Sphinx," from '64, in which the ruddy handsome Greek figure Oedipus stares intensely at the magnificently-winged lioness clutching to him and posing the infamous riddle regarding aging and the passing of time ("What is it that walks on four feet in the morning, two in the afternoon and three at night?" to which the tragic figure correctly replies that man himself crawls on all fours as an infant, walks erect in adulthood, and requires a crutch in old age). Most obviously, in the ancient legend, Oedipus kills his father so as to marry his mother Jocasta, and upon discovering this fact Jocasta subsequently kills herself while Oedipus blinds himself and goes into exile.

"It's a sin that will surely bring the Evil One back to this househould!" Grigory Vasilievich had cried upon seeing the piece. "It's a perversion upon the name of this family, Lord have mercy on us, and one shouldn't wonder that it comes from the pagan legends!"

Ivan, mirth sparing him from the effects of the triggering reference to the devil, had clutched Alyosha's chin so as to force him into a pout -- which had been difficult, given that the latter was laughing.

"How could Alyoshechka bring evil here? Come, Grigory Vasilievich!" Ivan's eyes had shone with sense. "Don't the Lord's angels fly because they take themselves lightly?"

Lise had by that time been preparing to bid farewell to Alyosha, Katya and Vanya. Katerina Osipovna, having renounced the advances of both Pyotr Ilyich Perkhotin and Mikhail Osipovich Rakitin (who'd gone to Petersburg to do exactly as he'd said he'd do, anyway), had met and engaged herself to a former general from Moscow who'd been in Skotoprigonyevsk to see the Monastery. Lise had, without doubt, loved Alexei in the very special way fourteen year old girls do love boys: with a singular magic. Parting ways tried their souls. Alyosha struggled for months after, having lost Lise. This wasn't to Ivan's ignorance, for though he was still in the frenzy of the madness, he was nevertheless attuned to Alyosha and highly aware -- to a fault -- of the negative impact he'd had on the Khokhlakova duo of mother and daughter.

To Moscow with Lise went the girl's and Alyosha's dream of a betrothal between innocent holy fools, a dream that could have been fulfilled as the two youths healed from the Karamazov tragedy. Before her parting, Lise, by now sixteen, had bestowed upon Alyosha an eros-soul kiss and swore that it would forever remain on her lips. Alyosha had then dug his nails into the palms of his hands making fists to prevent weeping in front of her, to stop him recklessly demanding she stay by his side: no, she was still a child and still ill and she therefore still needed parenting. God willing one day she'd find a man strong of heart to love her like she deserved.

"How is it that I couldn't ever dare throw away your letter," Alyosha had breathed and from his pocket produced the year-old love letter with a dried lily. 

Lise had then wept, had taken Alyosha's finger which bore barely-visible scars left from Ilyusha's bite and linked it with her own finger she'd smashed in the door after showing Alyosha her demon.

"Love people as though we were all ill," she'd beseeched him, blinking in love as Alyosha finally released tears from his silver-sky eyes, "all in need, all little ones, as your Elder taught."

Smerdyakov… Pavel Fyodorovich, not even deemed to have been named a Karamazov nor loved as a person with dignity much less as a brother.

"Like Dmitri's sacrifice, for the weeping naked infants," Alyosha had then said, to which Lise fervently nodding, kissing his lovely hands.

Let's return to the present: while Ivan's peripheral and dejected Andalusian Mephistopheles (finding renewed purpose by pursuing Alexei Fyodorovich to France in order to play with him and Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin) is for the time being circumvented in Paris by Myshkin's sacred magic, Katerina has been despairing over hers and her husband's several lethargic days and nights spent avoiding erotic love.

Grushenka, astute and very comfortable with erotic love -- how often do she and Dmitri write in double-entendre to each other in addition to their sharing their day-to-day life as well as their dreams of reunion? how wild and tender is the love they share though tragically separated! -- immediately notices on Thursday as the pair ride to the market that Katerina is still a virgin. A twisted virgin, but a virgin nonetheless. 

"It's nothing to do with your beloved!" Katerina sneers at Agrafena as she makes the remark that the other woman still "feels female, still smells female."

"Come now, come now, darling girl!" Grushenka wryly smiles, "Who's mentioned my beloved but you? Huh! Now, I should be rather alarmed you've got him on your mind."

"It's below me to play your stupid games while Mitya remains in the mines and I frightened to do my husband an injustice," Katya curls her lip and then moues, "if you must so know, and if it'll make you shut up about my smell."

Grushenka merely shrugs, taking Katerina's scorn at face value.

"Forgive me," Katya tsks, cursing herself.

"Injustice I do understand," Grushenka holds up her head, looking out at the summer morning's flowers. "I understand."

Katerina shakes her head thinking Grushenka distracted.

"Don't I?" Grushenka turns back.

"You don't know me well, and it's not just you who doesn't," Katya murmurs. Swallowing, she says as though it's all she'll reveal, "sensuality and brute honesty would lead you in that underground labyrinth Dmitri's locked into, straight to him, where intellectual labyrinths aren't as honest even if they're less brute."

Grushenka ponders, biting her lower lip, the carriage rattling on. Suddenly, she deftly reaches around and loosens her bodice. The rascal-natured woman tongues at her teeth, smiling, as she pulls her dress down so her sleeves don't bind her shoulders, and she removes her shoes and then her garters and then her socks.

Laying back, eyes closed in a kind of happy relief, she bunches up her skirts so that her shapely bare legs expose with only her bloomers hiding her from fully exposing herself to Katerina. Finally, she lifts a leg up and rests the ankle on the carriage window with her head laid back. Eyes do fix upon her own foot, however, this foot being the very first place on her person upon which Dmitri Fyodorovich placed his lips in Mokroye.

"Is it so bad, Katerina Ivanovna?" the woman in all her fecund glory remarks in a low tone filled with relief. Looking to the flowers and rolling her head back to face the open-mouthed Katya, she repeats, "is it so bad just to trust? Don't you hear the Lord's hymn in the birds, sweet girl? Don't you hear it within?"

Katerina is trembling, small triangular face gone pale as though haunted.

"You are your husband's wife, all right," Grushenka remarks, laughing without mirth. "Good God save us, but, let new skin grow upon the lacerations, the flesh isn't so brute but rather delicate -- like you, Katya, like a flower."

Upon Agrafena tapping her cold and sweaty hand in solidarity, Katerina crawls closer to her and in a manner very unlike her usual one. Like a proper spider mother, Grushenka marvels (who's the creature now?). Katya's dark eyes bore into the other woman's as though she's seen the same Mephistopheles whom Ivan's entertained.

"What is it?" Grushenka mouths, frowning in concern.

Katerina whispers things to her that cause the woman not only to deepen her frown but to also grow pale.

Katya finally finishing, Agrafena crosses herself and breathes out a sigh.

"You can't possibly think of not speaking of this to Ivan Fyodorovich before he finds out," she swallows, regaining her composure, "is... is that what the priest said to do? It must be, musn't it?"

"It is indeed what Fr. Paissy said to do," the fragile Katerina confirms.

They're almost at the market and Agrafena Alexandrovna coaxes Katerina Ivanovna into her arms, to hold her and rock her to and fro like a mother would a child as she sobs.

That night, as Alyosha's being carried up the steps by Myshkin and Aglaya in a townhouse in Paris, Katerina says her prayers before the ikons and watches her husband clumsily do likewise. It still comes with difficulty, Ivan's submission.

"What have we to hide from each other, now that Christ ascended last Thursday and that the Spirit waits to descend this Pentecost Sunday," Vanya is breathless, caught in a state that might just go into mania but seems more like ecstasy, and his eyes focus in a way they hadn't for years, "now that these days in which we've been bound together are the ones in which to veil ourselves like a flower in the night?"

Katerina runs her finger along his lips as though they were petals of the mentioned flower.

"The state would ascend to the church," she gently murmurs, "is what you've said you used to dream of?"

"Ah, my idiocy! I still dream of it, darling, regard the man you've wed." Ivan's arm surrounds her waist. "Do you know him?"

"How he asks questions," Katerina marvels, a look of simultaneous terror and delight in her eyes, a look she's adopted from the man holding her, "would it that he could reach my answers, my purpose, my evidence of forty days in the desert giving in to each temptation?"

Ivan's mouth twitches, eyes narrowed.

"Isn't he your tempter?"

"He is my accuser," Katerina yearningly kisses his mouth and said mouth relaxes, "necessary for my conversion or for my condemnation, my Grand Inquisitor."

"In the black and white thinking -- like the garments -- of the Order of Preachers of Dominic," Ivan gazes off, "like Thomas."

"Thomas," Katerina slowly says, following Vanya's thread, "the Apostle who doubts the Risen Lord?"

Ivan laughs suddenly, coming out of his reverie.

"Yes! But, I was thinking of the Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas, of that Order of the Inquisition, writing out volumes and volumes of cases for Christ: matters and objections, responses and references, all so neat and tidy until they say..."

A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you!" Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe."

"Hm?"

Ivan looks back to his wife, as though understanding something that he'd always had access to without realizing.

"Until they say he had a vision of Christ, Katerina, or that he went mad: regardless, he never finished writing on the Mysteries of Bread and Wine."

Katerina blinks. The moment seems like eternity, the candles below the ikons casting shadows against their fading circles of divine light. Christ, Moses and Elijah glow white upon Tabor while Sts. Peter, James and John cower and seem to fall back down to the foot and therefore the shadow of the mountain. Katerina's hand rests on Ivan's chest while his rests on her torso just below her breasts.

"Of what should I inquire?" Vanya breathes. "If I feel I know your thoughts so well, and rejoice in our parrying sweet dialogues?"

"My lacerations," Katya replies.

"Will you stay quiet or answer?"

Katerina stays silent against the inquisition.

"You sin?"

Katerina stays silent against the inquisition.

"You desire?"

Katerina stays silent against the inquisition.

"You desire Dmitri!?" Ivan's teeth grit.

Katerina stays silent against the inquisition, but to this accusation she can't help sadly frowning. Frowning against Doubting Thomas.

"No? You desire your husband, me?"

Katerina stays silent against the inquisition.

"You... you drove me mad?"

Katerina stays silent against the inquisition.

"Drove me mad on purpose!?"

Katerina stays silent against the inquisition.

"You female! Your ways are ones in which you can never be happy and therefore you must lacerate man when he reaches toward bliss, aren't they?"

Katerina stays silent against the inquisition.

"In the process, do you suffer lacerations upon yourself?"

Katerina stays silent against the inquisition.

"Don't you enjoy your suffering?" Ivan smiles scornfully. "Revel in it?"

Katerina stays silent against the inquisition.

"Don't you hate it, Katka, regardless?"

Katerina stays silent against the inquisition.

"Don't you... don't you wish to stop?"

Katerina stays silent against the inquisition.

"Have you always done this? I mean, even since girlhood, do you truly find solace in suffering self-inflicted lacerations?"

Katerina stays silent against the inquisition.

"Are you suffering?"

Katerina stays silent against the inquisition.

"What have you done?"

Katerina stays silent against the inquisition.

"What haven't you done, Katerina Ivanovna?"

Katerina stays silent against the inquisition.

"Have you cheated on me!?"

"NO!"

Ivan swallows, shaking as Katerina mildly convulses.

"Sh, all right," he murmurs. "Forgive me, my soul."

"Keep going."

"Have you cheated... yourself?"

Katerina stays silent against the inquisition.

"You have, haven't you?"

Katerina stays silent against the inquisition.

"You don't want to suffer, don't you?"

Katerina stays silent against the inquisition.

"You'd have to renounce your pride to stop, wouldn't you?"

Katerina stays silent against the inquisition.

"These lacerations... Katya..." Ivan looks like he could weep, and himself is trembling along with his wife. "They're only intellectual, aren't they? They're mental? Like my illnesses are mental? -- Spiritual, even? Like when Alyosha will in some rare times speak alarmingly with God's authority?"

"No."

Katerina has gripped Ivan's right hand in hers and extended his index finger. With the tip of this finger she points to the place upon which is hand had previously been resting: right up to her torso, to the seat of her soul one could say. With this finger she traces out letters upon herself. With it she submits to Ivan's accusation.

The accusation upon her, the title, reads: Karamazova.

After a beat, after a breath, Ivan brings her hand to his torso, her finger to his soul. With her finger he traces letters upon himself, so that she may accuse.

The accusation upon him, the title, reads: Perpetrator.

Katerina Ivanovna Karamazova then in an even voice begins confessing to her husband, looking straight into his intelligent gaze with her own large eyes, that she has a great deal of scars upon her inner thighs and right above her sex. These scars are results of cuts she's inflicted upon herself at particular intervals for over three years, ever since the night Dmitri Fyodorovich handed her five thousand roubles in Moscow and bowed, at what she claims have been any and every time she's experienced lust. Never has she allowed herself to see a lustful thought through, much less ever daring to touch herself, before making a cut. The stronger the urge, the more elaborate the fantasy that overcomes her like a spirit, the deeper the cut.

Huffing out a mewl, she finishes, "And, so, I submit all carnal pleasure entirely to you."

As though in a trance, Ivan decidedly and quite deftly unlaces Katerina's dressing gown so that her bare chest open, Katya permitting and willing. With a kiss to her hand and then to her forehead, he runs fingers along her thighs and, laying her gently back, raises the fabric.

Raises it slowly and softly.

"Oh, no."

"Forgive... me..."

Katerina's tears flow so abundantly they fill her mouth, until Vanya reaches forward and takes them from her into his own.

"No, forgive me," he breathes, swallowing her tears. "All my life, I'll beg you to forgive me." 

Running a loving hand along her left breast as it grows erect beneath his touch, feeling her heartbeat, then lower, he kisses her lips in eros, until his hand finds the softened lines of the scars.

"Promise," he growls between kisses and between his own tears, and his tone is not scornful while nevertheless angry, "promise you won't do this again -- promise the husband to which you submit according to divine law! -- that no matter what, you will never again do such harm to yourself!"

"You still want me...?" Katerina's voice raises with confusion, with grief, and beneath it all hope. "You, Vanya, the love of my life, still desire me after seeing my hideousness?"

"KATERINA IVANOVNA! Katerina... Katya!?" Ivan falls against her soft fragrant body in despair and clutches her to himself. "How could you think I wouldn't want you? How can you live and think like this, darling, when I'm so wretched, when I'm so helpless and mad against my own heart? When I'm the man who'll mutilate his own soul? But... you..." Vanya's verdant eyes widen in wonder and he strokes Katya's hair and her beautiful face. "You're actually..."

"I'm very much like you," Katerina finishes for him, swooning when Ivan begins kissing her all over in frenzy, inhaling him as though drinking him in like wine. "And, I promise to do as you say, Ivan Fyodorovich, for I love you! Lord, do I love you, my soul, and I thank you! Now, I beg you to take me, to take what's rightfully yours!"

Throughout the night until the dawn blushes indigo, Ivan kisses away the memory of every one of Katerina's lacerations, and kisses and adores the source of her aching desire -- the life-giving honey-wound she'd made an ikon out of. Our hero unites with his wife without causing her pain excepting a slight momentary discomfort, a slight natural bloodshed that should be the last she'll have to experience in matters of sensual (Karamazovian, to be most frank) desire. Once during a period of dosing, he smiles to himself and secretly thanks this Prince Myshkin, whoever he may be, for taking Alyosha away so the latter wouldn't be present in the next room. Within his dreaming, he senses his younger brother, too, trembling in France and trembling at the old murder, and so he calms him and gifts him with a golden chalice for all that he's a living saint who deserves a wedding feast like the one at Cana. So, now, it would seem that only the portrait of Oedipus and the Sphinx could hear Vanya's and Katya's moans and cries every time they wake and conjoin again.

There is another witness to their passion, however. 

Grushenka had heard their first loving ruckus when she'd come down the steps to heat up some milk. Then, numb and driven by resolve, she'd run back up to her room. As quietly as a cat she'd put on a cream-colored silk dress with crimson-colored silk roses in her hair and pearls and had rouged herself. Downing a glass of cognac, and then another, she'd departed her room and calmed the ache in her heart as she heard the lovemaking coming from Ivan's room, the pounding of two bodies on one bed, the cries of her Dmitri's once-betrothed for his very own younger brother.

Out into the balmy night she'd run and paid the carriage cab man with which she's built a trusting bond to take her to the house within which exists a room Dmitri had once rented, run by a man named Foma who houses prostitues.

"I'm here to celebrate with the girls," Grushenka had told the shocked Foma upon arriving, "and, I'll pay for two hours of their time along with good quality vodka."

Of Foma she'd demanded precisely the women with whom Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov had spent money on three years ago. This scandalous request had then been fulfilled upon a show of the money, and the women, six to be precise because four were currently occupied, had appeared before her.

"All ten! I'll pay extra what the men currently entertaining them have paid."

Grushenka now travels in the carriage crammed with the ten rapt prostitutes to the main village inn. Once there, she orders vodka for herself and them as she receives amazed looks from all present.

"Play music, oh, play the gayest music of the tsygane!" she loudly beseeches the band. "For tonight I celebrate the ancients! I celebrate man's need for multiple women and for one bride to adore -- one virgin bride! Though, who in this inn would believe me a virgin? Ha! Try and find out whether I am, and see what my cab man will do to you; he is a man of honor."

While the music plays and the public heaves with gossip, the prostitutes look expectantly at Grushenka as she distributes them drink.

"You all danced for him," she smiles, toasting, "but, I must honor my duty to be his wife before God, and it does not make me any more virtuous than you! It's just the way of things! Now, drink, be merry, and tell me what you love most about the touch and feel of a man when he's beyond all sense in your arms."

The prostitutes, laughing, and as they drink more and more, talk in salacious ways about their favorite modes of sex and are glad to find a kindred spirit in the marginalized and scorned Grushenka though she indeed be a virgin. Agrafena Alexandrovna kisses each girl on the mouth once at some point and asks each, "isn't this how he kisses?" to which each girl rather dumbly nods. They all remember Karamazov but have had so many men that he's frankly blurred in their memories.

"It was a monetary contract, mistress!" one humble girl pointedly remarks. "None of us did he feel very much for, besides perverse pleasure."

"What don't I know of monetary contracts, my girl, as I spent years as a usurer?" Grushenka cackles, downing more vodka. "Even if you enjoyed my Mitenka and he you, ah, you danced for him while I," she points to her breast, "am his bride."

No girl has the heart to remark her certainty that Agrafena Alexandrovna Svetlova has gone mad thinking Dmitri Karamazov will return soon from the mines and not that he'll most likely die and fairly soon if not certainly before his twenty-year sentence ends -- and even if he does survive, the two decades will render him ill beyond hope, twisted and elderly.

To hear Grushenka, Dmitri is and will remain a beautiful prince. The girls dance with her, regardless of her madness, admittedly hypnotized by the strength of the woman's conviction and the devotion to her man. At the crescendoing of the tsygane's music, she twirls with a ferocity that alarms all, skirt fanning out as though she were an exotic dancer from Hindustan. After every twirl, she hands over to each of the ten girls their promised roubles and then she merely twirls to the tantric drums and the melismatic singing of the tsygan woman to some strange goddess named Kālī while the others ululate.

After the final crash, Grushenka is in a state of trance and ecstasy. Wandering dazedly toward the door with all watching her, she stops before an ikon of the Theotokos and laughs in irony. 

"Would that the Paraclete descend!" she cries, panting, to her audience, many of which wait for an opportunity to scorn her, humiliate her, pounce on her or merely treat her as irrelevant. "Would it that all be saved, once and for all! The tsar was killed, God rest his soul, and serfdom is seemingly abolished! Ah..." Grusha calms her racing heart. "But, here we are in the days between the Lord's ascent and the Helper's descent! After the descent, will the freed really not turn from grace? The muzhiks sent an innocent man, the husband of my heart if not by law, to torture!"

Grushenka points.

"Here is my cab outside, but it is not Elijah's dark-flamed chariot taking me to God -- though little Ilyusha named for the prophet was taken years ago, and we pray the second captain meet him again," she points out Nikolai Ilyich Snegiryov, who hides his face in his hand, "for the lad enjoys the glory of Heaven having been an innocent! So says my kinsman Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov. Weren't so many of you at my kinsmen's wedding some days ago? They're all my future kinsmen because I'm to wed Dmitri Fyodorovich, and soon, and God willing bear him children. How the couple shone! And, I tell you," she raises a finger, smiling, "they will continue to shine, and my place is in the mines! In the labyrinths of the mines with Karamazov!"

Stumbling out of the inn, she weeps in the summer darkness, keening, "I can't find him! I can't find my beloved and the watchmen only beat me as I try," and the prostitutes meander out behind her. 

"Oh, daughters of Jerusalem," she recites Scripture from memory, from writing it with Mitri every month for all these years. "If you find my beloved in your memories, in the records of the ages held within your bodies (though your mind may not fully remember him), tell him I am faint with love..."

Chapter Text

Jacques Férradan lives on the Rue Palatine overlooking the Church of Saint-Sulpice in the plaza of the same name, a block away from the marvelous Luxembourg Gardens and just a few more from the newly-inaugurated Institut Catholique de Paris, in one of the oldest parts of the city.

Saint-Sulpice is dear to him he says because it is within the church's seminary that he began his initiation -- like Alyosha in the Monastery -- into divine life, though he did not become ordained. Having originally studied in a Jesuit college as a boy in Nîmes, he came to Paris to the seminary in '46 and since called the city his home despite his many travels. Férradan's mentors, some wiser than others and some more benevolent than others, have like him traveled around Europe and made many an acquaintance in all circles of society.

These individuals, these friends in certain circles, Férradan's one called "Salon de la Croix D'Or," may or may not indeed be called "socialists who are Christian" as Miusov's agent acquaintance had claimed. Perhaps they are simply artists, particularly ones whose art reflects their inner apotheosis. Perhaps they are, in that sense, mages if the term "mage" may find its root in the Sanskrit māyā which we've already explored has many meanings: matrix, mother, magic, measure, matter.

Prince Lev Nikolaevich and Alexei Fyodorovich, after their few loving kisses over the guitar, have taken the tram halfway to Saint-Sulpice and then walked the rest of the way, giving the former some time to elaborate on his history with Férradan. Myshkin explains that the "mage" had been in Geneva in '71 as part of a council consisting of various groups appealing for a reconvening of the Congress of Peace after the Communards had just fallen to the French army. The rehabilitation center the prince had been staying in was decidedly anti-Papist but Férradan and some of his acquaintances were not so foolish as to go announcing their love of the Latin Church.

"'It was the Jesuit in me,' is what he says," remarks Myshkin with a little smile, "and that's how he came to discover me and learn through the staff of my old benefactor Pavlishchev's conversion to Roman Catholicism."

Anyway, continues the prince, he has a fondness for Russian Orthodoxy. The caveat is that, as a result of its ("ours, I'll still claim it in my heart") unique development, the Russian soul is bound to demonstrate to the Catholic a magic that might breathe forth the Paraclete to the Far Eastern pagans or might just turn to Antichrist and teach the pagans secret evils.

Alyosha murmurs that he can attest to secret evils, quirking a brow, and then queries further into Myshkin's healing. Finally, the pair reach the Pont Neuf and his breath catches at the beauty of the golden-sunny Seine in the afternoon with its view of Notre Dame.

"How lovely do the Catholics build their cathedrals," he breathes, placing a hand to his own torso.

After a moment, Myshkin quietly and sweetly remarks that one day Alyosha must see the Neva of St. Petersburg. They, he claims, should pray that the Neva's bridges may one day stand as beautifully, like the Anichkov already does.

Dragging the hypnotized Alyosha away from admiring the exterior of the grand Church of Saint-Sulpice once they arrive at their destination, he rings at Férradan's building, after which he and Alyosha are admitted.

Jacques Férradan greets them and invites them to enter and climb to his apartment. The mage's appearance surprises Alyosha. If he hadn't come to trust Lev, he'd have believed this personage a madman with his poofed uncombed curls and his wild beard, wearing a caftan and leather slippers.

After establishing the dialogue with Myshkin as a willing translator, the three settle into Férradan's parlor for a light tea and to mildly talk.

"Thank you for traveling here," Férradan insists to Alyosha in Russian.

"Thank you for the offer, monsieur," Alyosha replies in French.

"I'm sorry to hear of the calamity in your family life three years ago, and that its effects remain, particularly that of your eldest brother's penal servitude given his innocence."

Once Myshkin translates to Alyosha, the latter expresses his gratitude and offers his assistance to understanding Skotoprigonyevsk's Monastery and to reveal his written composition of the life of Zosima.

Férradan insists they get to know each other first before revealing much about Zosima, "for, as I understand it, the Elder prophecied the calamity that befell your family and took certain steps to curb it."

Alyosha fervently nods.

"Please, given that your heart yearns for their peace, tell me of your siblings."

"I have two brothers still living and they are by far the dearest persons in my life, as though we're soul-triplets, for we all three know the other two's joys and sorrows with an intuition that surpasses explanation." Alyosha's eyes turn from bright love to dark memory, and he swallows. "And, my third brother took his life before he could stand trial for our father's murder; I sensed we were siblings but feared to broach the subject with him should he suffer more."

That same proud fear, Alexei claims, haunts him, "for I would have loved him -- I should like to love him even now, despite his taking away our father from this world as well as his own person."

Férradan pouts and frowns, empathizing, and though Myshkin translates he's already understood much of what the young Karamazov said.

"Have you ever imagined you have siblings you don't know of?"

After the prince's prudent translation, Alyosha solemnly nods.

"Yes, I have actually thought I might, but, the circumstances are quite curious." The young man sadly smiles. "For, even the fact that my deceased brother's mother drew close to my father's house to give birth before she died indicates what kind of strange man my father was: one to whom the women he joined with would have come to for such news as being pregnant of him."

The moment Myshkin finishes translating, Férradan replies, "my dear sir, that sounds quite likely, but, perhaps any woman might not have had the chance to before your sibling passed in her womb!"

The prince releases a small sigh before looking at Alyosha with his deep eyes and relating what the mage has said.

"...I... haven't wanted to consider that," the young Karamazov averts his eyes, "but I... have inadvertently thought it in the confines of my heart."

Alyosha is shaking.

Férradan shuts his eyes in pain that he'd have caused such a reaction.

"I'm nearly sure that such a soul existed," the mage continues, "and was quickly taken away, but, I have this feeling you know that the younger a human soul the more boldly it asks the Lord for mercy and then elevates to a joyous angel: such a thing I sense you've learned and know deep in your heart."

As Myshkin translates to Alyosha, the latter takes the former's hand in both of his and murmurs in Russian to him with the tenderest and saddest expression, that the Elder Zosima did indeed say such a thing about young souls.

"I'm trying to be brave, Lyova," Alexei admits as Myshkin soothingly touches his cheek, "but, I'm so far from accessing my brothers and loved ones, and now my departed -- even Papa and Smerdyakov and especially my beloved mother -- seem to be calling to me."

Myshkin looks to Férradan and begins respectfully to ask that the conversation might halt for a time.

Alyosha, getting the gist and understanding, begs that it not and assures the surprised prince.

"Continuons s'il vous plaît, monsieur," he does his best to clearly pronounce to Férradan, and with utmost sincerity, as he wipes his tears, "s'il vous plaît."

"You are the fifth of a line, and the pentacle suits you," Férradan claims. "Your élan vital -- let's call it your soul's blood, the way it runs from the heart of your spirit -- is one of a High Priest, always represented by the numerical value of five for the Five Wounds of the Master."

Alyosha doesn't know what to say when Myshkin tells him this last idea, but he's consoled by the latter genially telling it suggesting that he agrees.

"Your Elder Zosima seems to have placed a seal upon you by commending you to the world within which we consume Bread and Wine and therefore wed ourselves to the Bridegroom."

Alyosha blinks his dark lashes.

"You hunger and thirst for righteousness, and this seems like one of the many things that bond your siblings and you, and are therefore blessed according to the Beatitudes."

Férradan continues: "You bear the wounds of Christ with which He gives us his Body and Blood for nourishment and aren't therefore one to be troubled (as per the words of the Apostle to the Galatians), and many bear witness to this untroubled nature of yours; your prayers often bless the Patriarchate, in all senses of the word (and it's very mysterious to ponder these things) in the way Melchizedek blesses Abram with bread and wine before the father of nations is renamed by God as Abraham."

The mage gestures with two fingers, as the prince Myshkin breathlessly and carefully translates, two fingers making a pentagram as though one were right above Alyosha's head.

"Your guardian angel is close to being a Seraph! Forgive the very candid way I speak, dear son, but, you have extraordinary gifts along with and because of the wounds you bear."

Alyosha's eyes shine like beams of light cutting through the overcast days of his and Myshkin's Russia's winters.

"And the menstrual blood I sense in me?" he blurts like it's the final thing left to resolve before he's certain of the mage's grace.

Prince Myshkin, smiling sheepishly, translates and Férradan laughs as though he were touched by a naive child.

"Ah, my brother in Christ, your Orthodoxy does fear the female more than our Catholicism does, isn't it so? Haha, well, perhaps some time learning more of our traditions might help you grow to befriend that feminine charm in you, that floral virginity, that dark private womb in your soul like a golden chalice -- gold from fertile earth! I sense you know much about gold and about chalices -- and to deepen your bond to the Virgin of Virgins, Mary! When your senses lean toward you being more female, even in your appreciation for the beauty of the male form (though take care that it never linger in Sodom and be violated! God protect you!), don't be frightened."

Myshkin translates with much gentleness in his voice and joy in his pretty face, and Alyosha sighs and relaxes.

"For we come from woman!" Férradan proclaims. "From her lunar cycles, reflecting the sun, reflecting God's wise design for creation! 'He saw it was good.'"

"My mother's name was Sofia! My precious mother!" Alyosha cries in wonder, wringing his hands, looking alarmingly like his said mother. "Named for Wisdom!"

Férradan doesn't need a translation.

"Of course she was named so: and you are Alexei, 'Guardian,' born from Sofia, 'Wisdom,' and regarding your surname you may indeed come from the race of the wandering Roma from India..."

Myshkin hums knowingly as he translates.

"The Prince of Fools and the High Priest," Férradan beams at the pair of rather lovely men, lovely for all that they're so highly sensitive and smart though some might call them dense and problematic, "ah, may the Lord continue blessing our Salon's little work and all these dear friends who come to share with us, for we boast nothing but the doctrines while sharing bits of wisdom like sharing loaves and fish -- a shame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, from your Motherland, and her companion Steiner, have formed a cult based on the ouroboros! For, while Madame Blavatsky tours India, she most likely confuses some Hindu concepts."

Férradan continues by describing how Myshkin has already briefly spoken to him of the Karamazov surname's possible origins, "and I would like to end my pedagogy for today and then invite you to some practical questions before the evening compels us to part ways, but not before sharing three basic Hindu teachings with you, dear Monsieur Karamazov, if you haven't already learned of them."

The Hindu Trimurti and Tridevi, he explains, developed as the centuries drew on from the time of the composition of the Vedic texts. The triad is composed of the divine nature manifesting in three aspects of God, not unlike the Christian concept of the Trinity but not exactly like it either. The three gods in yogic (or bonding) worship are named Viṣṇu, Brahmā and Śiva, and to each corresponds a female consort.

Viṣṇu is the Preserver, also the Savior: this god is passionate and romantic and loves taking on human nature and does indeed do so through many representations (known as avatars). The avatars to which most people are undoubtedly devoted are his Krisna and his Rama. Viṣṇu's consort, his feminine counterpart, is Lakṣmī. Lakṣmī is a goddess of material wealth and great fortune, and when depicted in her true form sits on a lotus pouring out infinite quantities of gold coins from a carafe and is flanked by two magnificent elephants. Lakṣmī also takes on human nature through avatars. In the epic called the Mahabharata, Krisna as a playful youth falls in love with Lakṣmī in the form of a country milkmaid named Radha who dances with the other milkmaids while Krisna plays his flute by the River Ganges. Their coupling is worshiped for its youthful magic. Performances of their dancing and carousing are called rāsalīla, the term referring to 'playfulness.' When he is older, Krisna mentors the prince Arjuna on the deeper meanings of war and familial loyalty.

In the epic called the Ramayana, Viṣṇu manifests as a prince named Rama who is exiled from his rightful throne and kingdom to the wilderness by falling victim to ill-constructed law and justice. Nevertheless, innocent Rama nobly takes on the punishment and therefore fulfils his duty (his dharma). Rama is accompanied by his loyal and virtuous wife Sita, who is another avatar of Lakṣmī, as well as his younger half-brother Lakshmana. In the wilderness, Sita is abducted by a demon, Ravana, by trickery, and she must be rescued by Rama and Lakshmana and an army of monkey-deities. This elaborate story and its gods are beloved by many Hindus for its high drama and exemplary characters.

Now, the second to be named as a god by Férradan is Brahmā, the Creator, the least ostentatious of the three gods, "and yet in his quietude he may be the most powerful: he is the god of consciousness." Brahmā is the most ancient of the three. Brahmā dreams so as to forget himself. From his nomenclature derives the philosophy of Brahman which posits that existence itself is one: consciousness precedes essence. Brahmā is not a progenitor, per se, for there are no firsts and lasts. Brahmā knows he is god. Yet, he yearns for a reality in which all aspects of himself are within himself unknown to be actually united, as being linked in ultimate generative reality. Creation, therefore, is necessarily unaware of its blissful journey from consciousness toward the play of ignorance and then back again once carnal death leads to carnal reincarnation according to the measurements of time (reincarnation not necessarily implying resurrection). This is why there is peace and calamity as creation's time runs its course, with calamity augmenting as the end draws closer and more quickly before Brahmā awakens and remembers bliss.

The god is never exhausted by his contemplative dreaming, for he rests on the lotus. The lotus, the life-filled stem, emerges from the deepest darkest mud where the ancient reptiles shift with the earth and the insects creep, up and up to the surface of the waters so as to unfurl to the sun and moon and stars and with clean dew upon its pad. By the dreaming Brahmā's lotus is his lovely swan upon which he may climb aboard and continue floating on the Ganges whenever he likes. Brahmā's wife Saraswatī is the most beautiful of the goddesses for all that she is, due to her male consort's nature, the source of art and creativity and the ways in which creation expresses its form by giving itself away. Saraswatī is also always depicted on a lotus or a swan and plays upon the sitar the music of māyā. Brahmā's dreams are all magic and measures and matrixes and matters, all māyā. What's beyond space and time? Consciousness.

Some say, perhaps, that the Hebraic patriarchs Abraham and Sara are named so for Brahmā and Saraswatī; but, this would cause great confusion and alarm to many people clinging to a particular dream of what "god" should be, and so it remains a rather hidden albeit symbolic truth.

Finally, Śiva and his consort Pārvatī, says Férradan, "must actually be spoken of to you another day, my good sir, for some knowledge might not be right to have at certain times."

Both Myshkin and Alyosha snap out of their reverie, especially the prince who'd been lulled between interpreting the Russian and the French tongues and whose voice had gone melodic.

Out from the window can be heard the high-pitched voice of a fifteen-year-old girl shouting in Russian: "You liked cherry compote as a child, Alyoshechka, but, your brother liked the pineapple kind!"

Lev Nikolaevich curls his lip but composes himself, and lures the unseen spirit to limit itself. After the prince translates to Férradan, the latter slowly approaches the balcony, the former not far behind. Alyosha has fallen to his knees to pray.

"Pineapple compote, Alyoshka, pineapple when you were four years old and he eight, Lyoshenka! 'Perhaps he is a mason, I've thought Ivan is a Freemason!' The Madonna and Sodom! It's me, Alyosha, it's your playmate!"

"Who are you?" Férradan quietly asks the existent in French.

"I'm named for the Fleur de Lise," the spirit replies in French, playing on lys for lilies and lise for Elizabeth.

It indeed resembles a fifteen-year-old Lise if she could have walk at that age, and though she were a French schoolgirl, skipping back and forth upon the Rue Palatine.

"What have you come for, and come so close to the Sacrament?"

"To play with Alyosha!"

It switches to Russian, yelling out: "Alyoshka, come out and play with me! Remember when I'd mount your shoulders as a child? Well, I can mount you now in all kinds of exciting ways and I've wanted to for so long! Why do you think Ivan was so excited to see you at the restaurant that afternoon the three of us spoke? Was that truly 'brotherly love'? You're a Karamazov and an insect and nothing corrupted is beyond you; that's how I first met your Ivan and met all of you! How cute is young Kolya, eh? The prince Myshkin knew a young Kolya too, ooh! I've been looking at your prince and seeing all sorts of curious things! You wouldn't believe what Myshkin's Kolya's been up to in Petersburg this year and would believe me even less if I told you whom he lays beside at night talking to in the deep dark! It's too much even for the author of a roman, like Kirillovich said!"

Myshkin turns and translates the part about "fleur de Lise" to Alyosha, who, trembling, recognizes that the spirit is imitating Lise and knows a great deal of private information.

"It seems it was once attached to brother Ivan," Alyosha keens, dizzy with a headache, the kind he imagines Ivan suffering back in '78.

"Like a Great Dane, Alexei! Comme un chien Andalou, as you stay in filthy Montmartre with its French gutter rats!"

"Where are you from?"

"Karamazov knows I'm from corners of the Alcázar of Sevilla where the infidels built palaces before the Catholic monarchs drove them out through the Reconquest and that final dreaded Inquisition," the spirit taunts Férradan and the listening Alyosha in French, "those monarchs whom the Russians envy for their conquests and gold!" In Russian, it calls out, "Alexei Fyodorovich, if only you were to see my looooong tail and take me from behind like a dog, like a sodo... so-- like a --!"

The spirit struggles to continue, getting frustrated and confused by the mage's and Myshkin's combined sacred magic and especially by the Church.

"That's right, you," Férradan curls his lip, "be quiet."

"You can do it all over, Alexei, and I can help save Dmitri! Ivan might never have to fall! Your father won't have to be murdered, for you can help save Smerdyakov! You can change everything, we can do it over, you'll be safe!"

The spirit makes its last attempt, twisted and desperate and making Lise look ugly: "Your lover has time-magic, and you and he know what to do if you both wanted! Lev Nikolaevich, you have the power to do it over and resurrect Nastasya! 'Anastasya,' as in resurrection! You can do so because of free will and through knowledge about Śiva that the hairy mage is keeping from you and Alexei!"

And, with that, the spirit disappears into the shadows.

After Myshkin's translation, Férradan and he lean down to the sobbing Alyosha still on the floor.

"I'm going to give him a seal like Monsieur Rogozhin gave you, Léon," Férradan murmurs to Myshkin, whose heart bleeds just a little more than it already has been at hearing Rogozhin's name.

Around Alyosha's neck, after a moment, is placed a gold chain with a scapular at its end, a Carmelite symbol of Mother and Child summoning souls out of Purgatory.

"I have this feeling you know well the power of Mt. Carmel and the Dark Night of the Soul," the mage whispers, "as well as the power that a humble image or an 'ikon' may have when one wears it."

Férradan strokes Alyosha's back as the latter clings to Myshkin's hands.

"Take heart, for the evil spirits always use that which is most holy to taunt us; the holier the love, the greater the grace, the more they'll sneer, and I'm sure the girl the spirit took the form of is special to you."

The prince translates but can't help adding terms of endearment like balsam to Alyosha's wounded heart and aching head.

"The girl's mother..." Alyosha looks up to the mage and then to Myshkin, "Lise's mother was the one who placed a silver ikon of the Theotokos around Dmitri before he went with the intent to kill our father! The girl's mother saved my eldest brother's soul if not my father's life!"

"No," Férradan tells Myshkin after he translates, "tell Alexei that it was the Mother of God who saved his brother's soul."

"As she did mine," the prince breathes, blinking away his own tears, "when I was just a poor knight."

Chapter Text

"How is it that you know about Japan?"

"Eh?"

"You knew about Japanese philosophy when I asked last week, on the night of Ascension Thursday.

"Oh."

Dmitri watches with his sensitive liquid-black eyes the man laying in the stinking dark beside him along with the other two-dozen or so men, their blankets frayed and cots ridden with fleas: he'd been here since March, is more or less Mitya's age, perhaps a few years younger, dark blond and well-statured with quite fine features and light-brown eyes that retain a gentle glow in them despite their sadness.

However, this young man is far too thin to be healthy. Mitya, being Mitya, as well as having served in the army, is tougher and more astute around maintaining his health. As a matter of fact, Smerdyakov had been the most obvious about it, but all the brothers Karamazov have a keen instinct for consuming good and fresh food and drink while avoiding that which will sicken them. Besides, the eldest brother's faith and his loving correspondence with family and his dream of escape all motivate him to stay as hygienic as possible and as aware of over-exhaustion and dehydration and maintaining good stamina and muscle tone.

Nevertheless, Dmitri Fyodorovich is like all the slaves lacking in proper bathing, for soap is scarce, and their facial hair is so unevenly shaven for all that there's hardly any lotion and only a few blades shared by so many men -- what's more, there are no mirrors. Every man's hair is dirty and hangs too long and must be worn tied back with string.

"My sister Varvara Ardalionovna's husband traveled there for business," the mysterious prisoner quietly replies. "I remember that from when they were still engaged, nearly fifteen years ago."

"Ah! Is Varvara Ardalionovna much older than you?"

"Yes, I was born much later than my two siblings."

Mitya nods.

"Does your brother-in-law still travel to Japan?" he queries. "Do you know what it's like? Eh, Tokyo and... the other one that sounds similar to it (ah devil take it)... Kyōto! Is it pronounced like that? Kyōto?"

"I know just a little about Tokyo, my friend, mostly that the city is undergoing great industrialization in comparison to cities like New York and London and Paris, with improvements on their original models of transport and infrastructure, but, I haven't heard details about it for some time."

The man sniffs, and Dmitri detects that hint of fear in his voice that many of his fellow prisoners have adopted that what might seem a mere cold is in fact typhoid. 

"I haven't spoken to my sister nor my brother-in-law for six years, not since my brother committed suicide."

"I see," Mitya remarks in a solemn voice, taken. "I'm sorry: God have mercy on your brother's soul, friend."

When the young man says nothing, our passionate hero offers, "my brother committed suicide; he was my brother through our father."

"I'm sorry."

The prisoner senses Mitya's desire to speak and asks, "Did his suicide contribute to your being sent here?"

Dmitri grins.

"It must be obvious I'm not here due to any kind of political offense."

"It is," the man concedes, a smile in his voice.

"If my half-brother hadn't committed suicide and stood witness at my trial, I might now have been with my beloved, married to her, living in New York or Tokyo or even the South America you mentioned last Thursday (curious that you should mention it, come to think of it)."

"Forgive me, but, your half-sibling must truly have been a coward." The prisoner knowingly eyes Mitya in the dark. "Neither my brother nor my childhood friend who once attempted suicide but failed at it ever moved to kill themselves so as to precipitate someone being sent to this kind of torture."

"Ah," Dmitri tsks, soul now agonizing, "well, Pavel Fyodorovich might have been a coward, but, please understand: his mother Lizaveta, God rest her innocent soul, had defects in her that caused her to live like a mild-mannered animal or an infant child who doesn't speak, and not only was he shown very little care in his childhood to the point of becoming my father's slave but he also suffered severe episodes of the falling sickness."

Mitya's heart moves at finally speaking out loud to another person the pain he's encapsuled within except for when he reveals it in his letters to Alyosha and Grushenka (of whose reply to his letter sent a month ago he eagerly awaits), and his soul breathes a little better.

"In fact," he swallows, "I'm sure it didn't much matter in the practical sense that he'd have hanged himself, apart from the awful sin of it," he bitterly laughs, and breathily, "for, he was on the verge of death due to months of illness after severe fits, his heart giving out and his brain infecting, and he might not have even been able to stand trial."

A choked keen emerges from the eldest Karamazov. Dmitri doesn't care that steaming tears blind his eyes. His pretty mouth sets in a scowl. So much emotion begs to manifest. But, how can he do so to a stranger? Can he risk it, lest he collapse into mad fits of rage or madness? After all, he really had believed it when he told Alyosha that he was bound to act in a way that would get him shot. As it was, he'd already fended off a few men willing to hurt him, through various forms of humiliation, who'd learned that his crime involved not bleeding-heart causes but parricide for the sake of money and a woman.

"Thank you for trusting me," the sweet-voiced man offers in a low voice, "brother."

"Hm."

"I... knew a man who suffered epilepsy, and, though he'd been cured for some years he fell back into fits and went completely mad."

"Oh?"

The mysterious man nods.

"This man, a prince," he laughs, revealing that his background is one of which he'd have rubbed elbows with princes, "was a good person, in fact a beautiful person and even dearer to me than my own brother had been." The prisoner describes being stricken when the prince fell so ill. "He was kind and loving, but, perhaps it was only due to his being treated for his sickness since childhood given his royal status."

"Aha, that's right, my brother was not treated like a human and much less a prince!" Dmitri heatedly argues, eyes flashing with his Karamazovian thirst for justice. "Smerdyakov -- that's the terrible name my father gave him, imagine -- could have been as sensitive and kind if he'd have been a prince and not a slave! I've seen slaves on horseback and princes walk on the ground as slaves."

"Funnily enough," the other man continues, "the prince was involved in the murder of a socialite, though not responsible for it, for which another man was sent to the Kara mines."

"Oof, Lord." Mitya frowns, and then comes upon him longing for news of Ivan's mental state, for news that he's heading toward full recovery and especially through Katerina as he'd made clear in his letter. "And, brother, did you ever know whether this prince recovered from madness?"

"In fact, he did," the prisoner remarks in a happy voice. "The prince was sent to Geneva and recovered his speech and was able to function -- but, you know, friend, he was able to do so only by the aid of some Europeans that are.. mad in a different way."

"..."

"I suppose I have a more explicit version of their madness, which has led me here," the prisoner laments. "I was involved in socialist circles all of whose members have been rounded up since the tsar's assassination."

Mitya stays silent and vulnerable, eyes pensive as his long lashes flutter.

"I can say I regret my stupid and selfish notions now," the mysterious man says, "but, I understand it was due to reverting to the ideas of my childhood friend named Ippolit who'd died of consumption, as well as the trauma of my father's death and the prince's involvement in my family's life, and then finally my brother's suicide."

"If it won't deeply upset you to say: why did your brother take his life?"

"My troubled brother began to heavily drink like my father had done so before his death, and after a woman scorned him he began to try and imitate my brother-in-law's money-lending just to find himself incurring the wrath of some very dangerous people." The young prisoner sighs, and Mitya can tell he also holds back tears which eat away at his heart. "He was full of hatred and claimed he wanted to leave my poor mother in peace after thirty-five years of cleaning up after his 'wretched self.'"

"Oh, what's your name, brother? Please, so that I may pray for you now that we've shared parts of our inner hearts?" Dmitri begs, hand to his chest. "And for your family's departed?"

"I'm Nikolai Ardalionovich Ivolgin, my brother was named Gavrila, and my father was the General Ardalion Alexandrovich." Kolya, closes his eyes as tears quietly slip down his cheeks. "And you, friend, aren't you Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov?"

"I am!" Dmitri exclaims. Suddenly sneering, he looks around and mutters, "gossiping hens go around saying my name; I mind my business and say nothing of anyone!"

Composing himself he turns back to Kolya, saying: "Yes, dear Nikolai Ardalionovich, and please call me Mitya if you'd so like."

"Gladly, and please call me Kolya."

"My youngest brother Alexei Fyodorovich's scholarly protege is named so! Kolya, dear, Kolya." Mitya savors the name. "Would it that we'd leave this inferno, Kolya, and return to where our consciences may be sufficient punishment for our foolish sins."

Kolya offhandedly remarks, while pondering something else, that his son is named Pavel like Pavel Fyodorovich to which Dmitri congratulates his being a father and asks about his son and the mother.

"My wife, Vera Lukyanovna, was spared this fate, and I knew I could never tell her of my involvements for hers and Pavel Nikolaevich's protection."

"I shall think nothing less of that kind of nobility from you, but, oh, these political involvements! Kolya!" Dmitri puts a hand to his own forehead. "My younger brother Ivan Fyodorovich -- he and Alexei were born of the same mother, my father's second wife Sofia Ivanovna, while I was born of Adelaïda Ivanovna his first, God rest both their souls -- suffered madness due to these political ideas, for three years."

"Three years?"

"He's improved and can further do so by marrying his beloved, but, he thought all kinds of strange political ideas before and during the calamity of our father's murder in '78!"

"Well, there's the rub, and I should know."

"Yes, devil take it!" Dmitri pouts. "Tell me you're cured through the repentance you mentioned, Kolya!"

"I should say so, Mitya."

"The Theotokos is with you! With us, here, in these caves." Dmitri drops his head lethargically to one side as he lays on his stomach. "No, our Vanya entertained all sorts of musings on the state ascending to the church and God knows what else... and, it so deeply disturbed poor Alyosha when he found him reduced to raving that the Devil dressed in checkered trousers had harassed him in his room about axes flying around the frozen firmament: he'd read Euclid and Epicurus and Kant and Hegel and Bentham and Diderot and Marx, of course, and Schopenhauer... all those terrible men! De Sade and Voltaire!"

Mitya sighs.

"Though, I admit that what seems like casuistry from the Jesuits has revealed itself not to be the villain I thought it was, and my brothers have helped me understand all that -- but, darling, I'm almost convinced that Antichrist visits those who engage these men's writings and their influences! Please tell me your soul cries out against socialism! Oh, my head aches."

Dmitri reaches out for Kolya's shoulder as the latter chuckles.

Kolya reveals, "I never used to pay much heed to this idea, though I always respected the individual, but, my father-in-law Lukyan Timofeevich Lebedev often likened Apocalypse to the speed and vertigo caused by the railcarts and I say: which man -- especially the Russian man -- has never found himself speeding quicker than a ray of light toward oblivion?"

"Oh, under the stars, yes!" Dmitri admits, grinning at the irony. "With a promise to punish my own life, and with pistols and a troika full of Strasbourg pies and four-dozen bottles of champagne!"

Kolya laughs and insists he'll leave Dmitri's anecdote to his private meditations, the light returning more to his tired eyes.

"You are like my brothers, oh, how we struggle with all kinds of pride and lechery and greed and lethargy."

"I am certainly no saint," Kolya readily admits. "And due to acknowledging my complexes and paranoias, I ask you, Mitya: given the amount of gold here and the fact that we're treated not nearly as harshly as those in other mines, with only thirty prisoners thus far and no one knowing of this Zheltuga, what kind of speed-psychology is the Russian justice system employing?"

"Probably some kind of devil-alchemy, yes, it's strange," Dmitri mutters, head pounding while, unbeknownst to him, in Paris his youngest brother is recovering from a spiritual attack earlier in the day. "Now, you please answer: why South America, and why did you say you were mad in the way those who saved your epileptic dear prince are mad?"

Kolya pauses.

"An axe around the frozen firmament," he muses. "Perhaps your brother isn't so mad, Mitya, perhaps there's something to magnetism, and perhaps certain spirits are drawn to certain materials."

Mitya listens.

"My brother-in-law Ivan Petrovich Ptitsyn did say about the Japanese that something in their philosophy (that nature-worship I spoke of last Thursday) suggests that the human willing toward one goal usually results in the universe fulfilling its polar opposite, and that it all involves time." Kolya swallows, eyes averting in shame, and with a tight voice asks what good came of killing Alexander. "The more we rush toward something, the slower our perception of its fulfillment just to have the dream dissolve, spinning invisible, meandering around in circles in the labyrinths that the very earth could have always revealed to us without our forcing it."

"Mokroye," Dmitri breathes, and he can close his eyes and feel his own mania again. "I understand, Kolya, and I agree."

"There's more than gold in South America, more than riches in India, there are geological magnets certain people might find answers to regarding spiritual matters."

Dmitri smiles at his new friend, which brings to Kolya comfort he hadn't felt since leaving Vera and his son.

As he and Kolya fall asleep more calmly than ever before now that they're friends, Mitya switches from such dark pondering and rather shyly asks his fellow prisoner how it feels making love to a wife a man truly loves and what seeing his firstborn is like.

"I imagine that the best allegory would be the way it feels to receive a blessing from the God you love," Kolya says mildly. "A mystery that seems so strangely very familiar, as if all good memories return as though new."

Mitya sleepily crosses Kolya from his cot.

"Thank you," he murmurs before dreaming.

Chapter Text

Katerina Ivanovna hears the carriage return at around half-past four in the morning, the sun already bright. Grigory Vasilievich's voice comes in clear, questioning Grushenka, who more softly replies something Katerina can't hear.

"Grusha just returned," she whispers to Ivan as she gently wakes him.

"Mm? From where, my love?"

"I don't know, I just heard the carriage returning and hers and Grigory's voices."

Katerina, finding her nightgown to place upon her nude self, shifts in bed in order to rise. Having underestimated her soreness out of naivety, she then cringes and cries out. A deep and dull ache -- not an ache born of harm, but from an altogether new, frenetic and wonderful kind of movement that might have gone on too long and too frequent for its first turns -- runs through her hips, up through to her womb, and sticky warm seed with a just a sliver of virginal blood runs out. The sticky buds.

"No, no, no, stop, I'll go; oh, forgive me, I..."

Ivan Fyodorovich gently grasps her shoulders to drag her back to a laying position, assuring she rest, asking forgiveness for not being more careful. Katerina's earlier cries for him still ring in his ear, but, he still curses himself for not being the wiser and considering the consequences of too frenzied a lovemaking for a virgin woman (especially, given the evidence of her hatred for her own desires, Katya's never even experiencing any kind of stimulation). Earlier, as she'd slept, he'd slipped a small towel beneath her to precisely catch the emissions that were bound to leak forth.

Promising he'll be back and begging that Katya not to get up, he slips on his trousers and his shirt and exits the room. Weary is he, himself, and achey from the pushing and the friction; oh, poor Katya, he thinks.

Grushenka sits in the kitchen having cold porridge.

"Where did you go, and why, Agrafena Alexandrovna!?" Ivan blinks at the blinding summer sunlight. "Are you all right?"

"Don't worry about me, Ivan Fyodorovich, nor ever doubt my love for and fealty to Dmitri." Agrafena Alexandrovna doesn't raise her weary eyes to Ivan's. "Go on: back to Katerina Ivanovna and to sleep, please."

Ivan frowns, still perturbed.

"Well, did something happen?"

"I spent some money for the company of some women, because I'm lonely... my own money, don't fret," Grushenka sighs as she lets the porridge soak up some of that sloshing vodka and, especially in this June heat when morning light begins at three, heal her hangover. "Ivan Fyodorovich, please, leave someone like me to her own business at a time like this," she raises her eyes to the ceiling, smiling ruefully, still not looking at Vanya, "at a time when you need to be happy -- someone in this family, after all, needs to be happy, and Lord knows you've earned it."

Ivan Fyodorovich only very slightly believes that he's earned happiness, and in his lingering mental illness he thinks Grushenka now speaks facetiously.

Agrafena Alexandrovna continues, with great sincerity: "Go, Vanka, my brother, and tell Katya there's nothing to worry about; can't you see I'm doing fine?"

Finally, she looks at her beloved's younger brother, at his face going lost again in remorse.

"No," she scolds, decisively shaking her head. "No more must you brood on whatever dark musings you brood on, because... besides your wife loving you, I love you! And, I don't want to see you suffer anymore and neither would Dmitri nor Alexei, just imagine those poor men!"

"It was me," whines Vanya, vertigo come once more to torment, "I belong in the mines, where Dmitri was noble! I ran away to Moscow like a dog, like Judas, and then became an invalid when the time came to reveal my rotten heart!"

"Stop that incessant litany we've all been hearing for three years!" cries Grushenka, slamming down her bowl, blue eyes flashing. "Stop! Stop dishonoring Mitya's sacrifice, as well as your wife's! You're a married man, by God! Will you act like such a whiney little boy before your wife? That's the way to act like a timid little lapdog: by whining! Aren't you past this, Ivan Fyodorovich!?"

Ivan winces in humiliation.

"I just went to the inn with Mitya's whores from three years ago to encounter my own torments and to ask the Lord to ease my restless mind, burning some money in the process: what does it matter to you?"

"What's this?" Keening and wobbling, Katerina Ivanovna in her nightgown appears in the kitchen. "What's wrong, Grusha? Oh, Vanya! Vanya?"

Seeing her husband's tortured expression, she gasps and lovingly takes his hands.

"What's happened?"

Grushenka takes a deep breath and closes her eyes to collects herself. Suddenly, she remembers the mythological onion she'd told Alyosha all about once.

Smiling in concession, she crosses from afar both Vanya and Katya, like how Mitya will later that evening cross Kolya Ivolgin.

"You shine together, don't you, Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov and Katerina Ivanovna? Aha, I'd have loved to celebrate with you at the inn, celebrate your loud and happy consummation after a whole long week of waiting! Ah, but, you're both so often wet mops, anyway -- if I'm going to speak frankly -- groomed with all your learnings and your fine arts."

Grusha impetuously giggles and waves her hand and begs forgiveness, watching in mirth as Ivan's pride's porcupine spikes flare out. Katya watches her husband nervously.

"Well, I danced with those ladies in honor of your coupling: yes, they are ladies in their own way, although they're looked on rather loathsomely by seemingly decent folk and indeed they can be very dense... And, I can be sure that if Mitya were here," she controls her trembling lip, hand to her heart, "no force on earth, not even I, would be able to stop him loudly carrying on about how wonderful it is for two of his loved ones to be bound in marriage, or would it? How happy will he be when he receives mine and Alyosha's letters, imagine! Just a letter knowing that his brother -- who's greatly recovered, near completely, from illness -- and his heart's first love -- though it was idol-making -- have finally come together! Just that thought alone might be enough for him to be happy for years! Years!"

Ivan glances at Katerina, both persons no longer troubled but greatly moved, and then he gratefully approaches Agrafena to kiss her hand. Of his love, he assures her, but more of his deeply rooted intuition that his brother's heart still burns in hope for their reunion.

Grushenka only softly grins, an impish expression on her face,

"I'll never forget how sweetly Katka kisses with that mouth, and what a pleasure it must truly be that you get to kiss it often and with passion," she whispers to him, quirking a brow at the smiling Katya, and Vanya gives her a withering yet brotherly look. "Now, please get yourself and her away from me, to rest in what God has bound together in grace and purity, for we'll certainly cross paths later within these very haunted walls."

Beyond
/\/\adonn/\
Beyond
§odo/\/\

Late in the afternoon, Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov and Jacques Férradan reignite a conversation based on the phenomenon they witnessed in the Andalusian spirit coming to taunt not only Alexei but also Myshkin.

"This is its third visit to me, and it's only ever appeared since I've arrived here," Alyosha reveals, "the first being in the street, the second in my dream, and the third here, and I don't think it'll return."

Myshkin had already briefed Férradan on the spirit's appearance on the streets last night, but, conceded that he hadn't spoken to Alyosha about a dream the young man had seemed to have had.

"Forgive me, Alyosha," the prince rakes a hand through his hair, "I went on for so long about myself this morning when you could have been telling me about your dream."

Alexei Fyodorovich insists there's nothing to forgive. To Myshkin, he relates his dream, and the former carefully translates to Férradan.

The prince watches Alyosha carefully, and by the time the latter's finished, he murmurs, "three temptations."

"Three temptations," Férradan says in French, without needing translation.

"Yes, the first being sensual, like Christ's temptation to turn stone to bread to nourish the body, the senses," Myshkin slowly says, as though allowing inspiration some time. This given, he continues, that the woman the spirit took the form of, Agrafena Alexandrovna, is the reason for Alyosha's father and eldest brothers' obsessions, "the former's being out of lust and the latter's being out of principle along with obsessing that he be granted his inheritance -- justice remaining practical for now, not yet abstract."

"And, would you know that Dmitri once saw a vision of Grushenka enter our family home?" Alyosha wonders aloud. "When she would never have! And during a moment in which Papa was drunkenly desecrating the memory of mine and Ivan's mother, even going so far as to forget that Sofia Ivanovna was mother to us both and not just me, so that I nearly fainted in imitation of her sorrow and Ivan began wishing in his heart that Papa would die (after saying 'let viper devour viper'), and just then Mitya stormed inside and indeed almost killed our father!"

The young Karamazov shakes his head, disturbed to the core.

"Now I know that it had been the spirit that day posing as Grushenka and inspiring my father's objectification of his second wife before hers and his very two sons: Dmitri, not having been born to my mother, still fell for the spirit's tricks and still moved to stamp out the man whom he perceived as the criminal stealing money and raping our mothers and even driving them to madness and sickness and death!"

"The spirit as Grushenka appeared headless," the prince recalls in Russian and then French, "as referencing the Areopagite you'd said frightened your father when Miusov mentioned it."

"Miusov swore he'd never even mentioned it before to Papa, and they wouldn't have been at a dinner together when Miusov told the story aloud like my father claimed!"

"Interesting."

Myshkin translates to Férradan, who then remarks, "and, of course, any time we men lust so strongly after a woman and if and when there's a mischievous spirit about, we begin considering her headless -- brainless."

The prince grimaces but humbly concedes, and translates.

Then, he remarks that the second temptation the spirit offered Alyosha was through a dream which "began in rather beautiful abstracts, you described, and slowly made its way to the more visceral, including a memory you technically don't possess since you weren't actually present for the phenomenon -- Mitya's repentance in the garden, and Fyodor Pavlovich's death at the hands of Smerdyakov -- and with Ivan present who also doesn't possess this memory except by imagination."

"Mhm."

"And, then you dreamed of Dmitri in Mokroye and considered the theory of your being Roma descendants, like I'd reminded Aglaya of while you slept and which was the basis for my analyzing your surname out loud (which you claim you heard); then the dream turned to your Elder and of feeling that the sacred feast at Cana was not your destiny for you felt like a 'dragon' in sensing that you're female in your heart as well as male."

"And, that the female in me is wanton," Alexei adds, laments, "infected, that she's a prostitute, a means for my soul to be raped by others' corruptions as well as a means for my own celibacy to revel in knowing that no matter what I do I am depraved! I'm a Karamazov!"

"But, you're just a man," Férradan laughs when told.

"It's a test of abstraction contrasted to the reality of the material world, a beautiful abstract on a material world that's proven to you quite unbecoming and so therefore a failure to the theory," Myshkin poses to Alyosha and also translates, "the second temptation to put God to the test."

"And this third..." Alyosha averts his eyes. "To give in to creating my own universe in which I rule and control every detail, for I'm in full awareness of how all destiny should play out," he looks to the prince, "and, a temptation for you too."

After Lev Nikolaevich translates, Férradan looks impressed albeit concerned.

"This is a formidable spirit to be able to play on Christ's three temptations by Satan, as well as the ways in which 'three' seems to appear so often in your life, Alexei Karamazov," he says. "Not just any little devil can pay such close attention to the human subject so as to know exactly how to pose three very real temptations: it must savor this part of Christ's life very much and imagine that the Lord's rejection of the temptations is precisely why we should believe ourselves unable to resist them since we are not Christ."

"Ah, Monsieur Férradan, my Prince Lev Nikolaevich, that's where 'The Grand Inquisitor' would come in," Alyosha remarks, ruefully.

After the explanation of his and Ivan's life-altering parry three years ago at the Metropolitan restaurant in the square of Skotoprigonyevsk, around a simulated Inquisition of Christ in Catholic Sevilla, Lev Nikolaevich and Férradan then understand the spirit's references and indeed its old origins.

Alyosha again insists that this spirit was attached to Ivan Fyodorovich: "However, it's not behaving in the same way it behaved around my brother, according to what Vanya's said and the effects I've witnessed; it seems to play a different game now, taunting us who are believers and not atheists, and," he looks at the pensive prince, "acknowledging Lyova's time-magic."

"And calling us 'lovers,'" the prince softly but pointedly remarks.

"Yes."

Férradan blinks.

"Are you lovers?" he asks, bluntly but with innocent curiosity.

Prince Myshkin smiles rather dazedly, addressing Alyosha, "I look to you to ask: am I your lover?"

A rare phenomenon then occurs. Alexei for a moment adopts a feminine look, a feminine air. Our hero's face morphs, as though in illusion, into an expression in which most of his features seem smaller and his grey-blue eyes larger and dewier and so tender, with the angles of face rounding out and even his facial hair reducing in the brows and disappearing altogether in the stubble of his shaved beard; his stance seems to curve slightly in the hips and in the drop in his squared shoulders; his flesh miraculously turns softer, and even a kind of floral perfume emits from his aura that is so subtle only those trained in the spiritual could identify it.

So striking is this phenomenon that even Lev Nikolaevich who is the cause for it is taken aback, not to speak of Férradan being stunned despite how much magic he's encountered before.

The moment lasts just long enough.

Alyosha says in a feminine voice, and not one some petulant misogynists can oftentimes adopt out of envy for the female, but the clear and pretty voice of a woman: "Am I your beloved!" It's not a question. It's a statement and a response.

The illusion breaks once he and the prince have said all they have to say with their eyes, and a lot they do appear to say.

Alyosha then appears again as he always has, as if nothing had changed: a handsome young man of twenty-three with male features, a male stance and stature (though more slight than average), a male aura, with a mild male libido, and wearing men's clothes rather well. Not at all is he a dandy or overly mellifluous. In fact, his skin tanned more than usual today from the Parisian summer sun and so paired with his dark brown hair he looks more masculine than if he were back home; the tsygan theory holds even more, for his complexion now does reveal a golden undertone like his brothers', suggesting traits of a race with darker skin.

It altogether seems like the phenomenon had never even occurred.

"Time magic," Alyosha ponders, returning to the matter of the spirit, while Myshkin and Férradan look at each other to confirm that such a transformation did indeed happen, "of course, Ivan would entertain a spirit who searches out those interested in time manipulation, or time travel, for we two did seem to travel to sixteenth-century Sevilla."

Upon hearing Lev's rather raspy translation to Férradan and noticing the other two staring at him rather curiously, Alyosha frowns.

"What's wrong?"

"Only that it's rare that two complementary individuals find each other like you and Léon," Férradan replies, "and that you, Alexei Karamazov, really have experienced an ecstasy in which the male and female within you manifest as complete: truly, you are a High Priest, or 'perfect,' although in a way that the exterior Church -- whether Catholic or Orthodox, much less any Protestant -- would be very frightened to acknowledge."

"Which doesn't mean the interior Church doesn't acknowledge Alexei," the prince heartily argues, eyes adopting a slight fever that would years ago have signalled the beginnings of a fit.

"Precisely so."

"Tell us about Ivan Fyodorovich, your brother," Myshkin pleads, nodding with encouragement, though Alexei finds himself worried over the two men's proclamations about himself, "Alyoshka, please."

Alyosha, wary but nevertheless willing himself to faith, describes Vanya's various details around his dialogues with the spirit, "whom he thought was Satan." The flying axe, the desire to become incarnate, the rheumatism and the discussions around the man walking for a quadrillion kilometers for two seconds of ecstasy, the Jesuit casuistry which sounded more like equivocation, scapegoating, nominalism, entropic cataclysm.

"Cycling," Lev Nikolaevich murmurs, eyeing Férradan, "saṃsāra, which I can relate to; no wonder the lad went mad."

"The spirit tempted you to use time magic for the resurrection of a woman?" Alyosha asks the mystified prince to confirm. "Playing on the name Nastasya? Of all names, for Anastasis!"

"Dear Alexei Fyodorovich," Myshkin laughs without mirth, memories flooding him, the universe flooding him as he builds panic and tries fighting it, "the spirit tempted me less toward Anastasis and more to Apokatastasis which tempts me toward megalomania."

Alyosha widens his eyes.

"Such a concept! I understand, Lyova... universal salvation," he swallows, recognizing the term, remembering that it was spoken of in hushed voices, as something very complex, something mysterious, something Mitya seems to have understood by his intuiting how mankind may hold the ideal of Madonna by the idea of Sodom at the same time, "dare we hope it's real?"

A memory comes to him of his brothers, of a time when he thought one of them dead and the other laughing when nothing of the sort was occurring, of which he'll later tell Prince Myshkin.

"To reply, I ask: haven't we met before?" The prince's eyes soften, as blue as the sea and the sky, both of which witness the spherical turns of the planet. "Haven't you dreamed of me before, and I you? Haven't we met and laughed and wept and hated and loved and kissed and killed and made love and betrayed, over and over, in sæcula sæcolorum until the illusion that we're separate may dissolve?"

/ Leech, there is only one person in the whole world who can tell Nikolai Krasotkin what to do -- this is the man, I obey him... /

/ Thus I think of you: you will go forth from these walls, but you will sojourn in the world like a monk. You will have many opponents, but your very enemies will love you. Life will bring you many misfortunes, but through them you will be happy, and you will bless life and cause others to bless it -- which is the most important thing. That is how you are... /

/ Dear little brother... perhaps I want to be healed by you... /

/ Save me, Alyosha! /

/ Alexei, you tell me, you alone, you're the only one I'll believe! /

/ Alyosha, my dear, my only son... only you I'm not afraid of... /

/ Deliver me, Alyosha, the time has come; it shall be as you decide... /

/ It shall be as he says --- that is, how much on the contrary, I thirst for your words, Alexei Fyodorovich! /

/ Papa, papa! How can you... with him... stop it, papa! /

/ Karamazov! can it really be true as religion says that we shall all rise from the dead, and come to life, and see one another again, everyone, and Ilyushechka? /

/ Don't give me away, sir... /

[Into Alyosha's hands he presses a gold chalice, smiling, "for gold is more precious to us than the silver of Joseph, and it's fit for the Blood of the Lamb -- don't reveal my identity as your trickster yet, just empty yourself like this vessel." ]

Lev Nikolaevich has no fond childhood memories the way Alyosha does, and of this so will he tell the latter later. Of a waterfall, though, he'll tell. Of the mystery of a living waterfall in the Swiss Alps.

"My father's name is a reverse of my own, Alexei Fyodorovich, and he died while standing trial for something I cannot recall because perhaps it hasn't happened yet; I can't be sure; and, I do not remember my mother, for I..."

Prince Myshkin weeps and his face is lovelier than any face Alyosha believes he'll ever see, so familiar, so defined, like an ikon.

"I am without a soul if not for the spirits!" he cries his terrible secret, one Férradan knows but still struggles along with other members of the Salon to reconcile regarding the Russian Prince of Fools. "That is my purpose here in this universe! In this tale told by the Lord, who loves in three ways and yet infinite ways by the number 'three' and who remembers union at the end of the æon... where I only remember what the spirits do! My flesh, my very cells, are like game for the spirits to feed on."

In the light of the evening sunset in Jacques Férradan's sitting parlor overlooking the Church of Saint-Sulpice, Alexei Fyodorovich drops to his knees and prostrates himself before Lev Nikolaevitch, exactly how Zosima had prostrated before Dmitri Fyodorovich in his cell before the līlā or the 'playful drama' of the Karamazov calamity began in late summer of 1878. Myshkin gasps and Férradan frowns while paying close attention.

"Spirit, that I bow to you signals -- as does creation signify creator, plurality signify unity, and existence signify essence -- that I bow to God." Alyosha places his forehead to the prince's feet. "Now, in the name of God, submit to me."

Just as Alyosha swiftly rises up does Myshkin collapse into his arms, though not unconscious. From the prince's deep exhale, his nirvāna, comes to a life of its own a curious apparition. Alyosha hoists Myshkin up to stand firm, and commands, "hold my hand, Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, like you told me to do so last night on the streets of Montmartre."

The apparition, a translucent reptile-scaled dragon appearing as a kind of horned snake with a mane and short legs, like those depicted in the East, flies in circles around the room and then rushes to Alyosha. Nobody moves, for all three men understand that the spirit cannot harm the youngest Karamazov. It merely clutches at him with its reptilian claws while its dog-like tongue moves about adjusting itself so it may speak. 

Its eyes are large hazel eyes, puppy dog eyes, and within its pupils shine various constellations.

"Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, please, send me back to the beyond!" it pleads in a female voice, and in a kind of sing-song. "I can't return to Sevilla, for there are no more hidden corners there, and I don't know where else to situate except within or beside humans who restlessly plot an overturn of the collective unconscious!"

"I understand," Alyosha evenly assures and lifts the hand not holding Lyova's to rest on the dragon's translucent mane.

"Forgive me for harassing you so as to bond with me! Forgive me for harassing the prince, who has suffered thousands of years of Siberian exiles -- quadrillion kilometers of wandering, as I learned from Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov's story-telling."

"I forgive your harassment," Alyosha says, calmly, to the shock of Myshkin, "and I understand your plight; you were not unkind to my brother, Ivan Fyodorovich, where I understand he was quite unkind to and petulant towards you."

"Thank you, servant of the Lord God."

"In Christ's name, then, I will send you to the beyond, only first assure me of a notion I've been pondering: has my brother, Pavel Fyodorovich Karamazov wrongfully named Smerdyakov, been justified?"

"He has been given another life, one with kind parents," the dragon's claws loosen their grip, "and for that I teased you about your brother Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov, for your brother's new friend in the mines is this young boy's father and this man happens also to be dear to the Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin."

"Very good, now," Alyosha eyes the window, eyes the shy blushing nearly-full moon as well as the curve of the cupola of Saint-Sulpice and sees very little different between the two, "return to your proper place."

With his Accusing finger, Alexei Fyodorovich points out the window and neatly does the dragon curl first affectionately around his shoulders in gratitude and then fly out the window. Whether it flew to the church to be absorbed back into the universe, or the moon, none can say.

"He's like Lord Śiva," Férradan can't help mumble to himself, hand over his mouth in surprise, "the moon crowning his third eye, destroying illusions, with the feminine energy of śakti."

"Oh, my Kolya Ivolgin is with your brother in Zheltuga! If we're to," the prince puts his hand to his beating heart, "take the spirit for its word."

Turning to Alexei, who's breathing heavily, he takes his hands and kisses them and blesses him.

"You've suffered so, my prince, and the spirit knew; I don't think it lied."

After this astounding event, the mage tends to the exhausted other two men. Insisting they eat and drink, he then strongly suggests they recall that after Christ's banishing Satan after his desert fast, the Lord went to his cousin John (Ioannes) to be baptized in the Jordan, after which the Spirit descends.

"And it is Pentecost the day after tomorrow for the Orthodox Church, is it not?"

Alyosha nods yes, waving his hand at being impolite as he finishes a delicious potato-egg fritter he's been savoring.

"While it's the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity for Catholics," Myshkin finishes for his mentor, gratefully smoking on the balcony while gazing out at the twilight moon.

"It's important that you each attend the Sacrament tomorrow evening at vigil or on Sunday morning and celebrate the feast according to your Rite," Férradan observes.

When Alyosha humbly offers his copy of From The Life of the Hieromonk and Elder Zosima, Departed in God, Férradan accepts but insists that neither Alexei Fyodorovich nor Lev Nikolaevich push their mental limits and suggests they wait to return on Monday.

"You need rest and the Sacraments, and then we will most certainly speak more on tonight's events and on Zheltuga, and certainly more on Śiva and the Eastern philosophies."

Alyosha thanks Jacques Férradan from deep in his heart, while the latter insists he keep the gold scapular. Prince Myshkin exchanges some intimate and encouraging words with the mage.

The two depart, and, while Saint Sulpice has been locked for the night, they head to the Luxembourg Gardens just to be among the flowers and trees as the night settles in. The palace stands magnificently before the Grand Bassin, and while such a garden features many walkways and statues to explore the pair find themselves in the grotto where the Renaissance-inspired Medici fountain stands: at the fountain's head is the magnificent and recently-installed sculpture of a scene in a first-century Greek legend in Ovid's Metamorphosis.

Acis and Galatea, the male mortal and the female water-spirit, make love by the sea while the enormous and envious cyclops Polyphemus discovers them and plots to murder Acis. As the reader may tell, an entire new story may be written just comparing this Greek legend to both of our heroes' tumultuous background stories, but, that is not the task at hand. Needless to say, the two men laugh tiredly first to themselves and then at each other, augmenting their humor, at the irony of the sculpture.

The prince observes that a bronze statue of Galatea exists at the Grand Cascade of Fountains at the Peterhof Palace in Petersburg.

"The stories a creative Russian story-teller might be able to tell just from this legend alone..."

"See? See that you have a soul, Prince Lev Nikolaevich! Please don't imagine that you don't."

Alyosha turns to Myshkin in the darkling final light of the day, as the moon whitens, and sees a reflection of himself and his own story thus far, and he yearns to hear what the prince recalls about his own life and to tangle their karmic threads together.

"Oh, my love, you may not think yourself capable or willing to use your conscience, as you act like a mirror to humans given that the spirits have befriended you and inhabited you and also submitted to you," he grips the prince's cold hands, "but, in this world I sense with all my being that you, in all your beautiful peculiarity, are my soulmate."

"Your soulmate," Myshkin repeats, with such childish wonder, looking down with brows furrowed. "But, no!" The prince defers back to despair: "What if I'm only your doppelgänger?"

"You're more in likeness to my three brothers combined -- particularly Ivan Fyodorovich in his solitary habit of dreaming and spirit-summoning -- than you are a double of myself, if you're anyone's doppelgänger."

Alyosha grins, drawing the prince closer to himself under the twilight in such a grotto of such a Garden.

"But that concept is an idiotic one, isn't it? Formulated by atheist story-tellers who are secretly believers?" In the privacy of the grotto where Acis and Galatea make love, he successively kisses the prince's cheek in eros and both men keen at the delightful sensation. "If you're willing to, Lyova, be the partner of my life along with honoring your celibate marriage to Aglaya Ivanovna."

"Alexei," the prince inhales sharply, hand gently grasping the other man's shoulder, "how am I to believe I won't bring you down? To believe that I can rise up? Only the Salon de la Croix D'Or has given me anchorage and opened up the Roman Catholic philosophies to me and to Aglaya."

"The Salon is not the Church and much less is the Savior," Alyosha reminds, laughing jovially in his easy manner. "Though Monsieur Jacques Férradan seems, indeed, a good man, bless him! -- A man in which I find reason to trust, and imagine that you did too!"

Lev Nikolaevich agrees, and admits to once more creating an idol, this time out of a group of individuals rather than any individual like Nastasya or Rogozhin.

"And your brothers?" he reminds.

"Help me help them, for there's a reason I'm here though I am quite young and quite a simple character and I don't believe I'm so special."

"Or, perhaps," the prince murmurs, with renewed hope the likes of which might cause a dragon to fly to the cyclical moon, "your yoke is easy and your burden light!"

Alyosha comes forehead to forehead with Myshkin, as the scene is set for Galatea to deify Acis by turning his spilled blood from the cyclops' murder to a river of sparkling water in Sicily by Mt. Etna.

"Let Nastasya Filippovna go on and be reborn if she must," he whispers as the prince breathes him in. "You must believe in the mystery of salvation and hope in Christ's Apokatastasis, not make it an infernal reality of circling and cycling like a woman who cannot find her beloved in the labyrinths."

Chapter Text

Pay no attention to the narrator who may have told you that Ivan had only first met Dmitri upon returning to Skotoprigonyevsk! Don't you know he was ill-informed?

No, Yefem Petrovich Polenov had gone to great lengths to find twelve-year-old Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov and assure that Ivan Fyodorovich and Alexei Fyodorovich would make his acquaintances: therefore, the aristocrat had the adolescent stay in his elegant manor with his brothers during the summers until his seventeenth year. At seventeen Mitya ran away for a year before joining the army, as he would go on to inform his brothers about, anyway, and promise he'd meet them again in the future. 

Upon their first meeting, the proper boy-genius Ivan (eight years old then) was stunned by Dmitri's urchin ways. Later on, Alyosha would muse that Kolya Krasotkin reminded him uncannily of a young Dmitri. The picaresque adolescent lacked refined manners; he compulsively longed to be running barefoot in the dirt whacking sticks around and looking for other rascal-type boys his age in the neighborhood with which to commiserate and smoke and make trouble.

Ivan was disappointed that perhaps his elder half-brother possessed the same nature as that of Fyodor Pavlovich. The disappointment quickly passed when Dmitri's affable and adaptable nature permitted him to enjoy the fineries and comforts of Polenov's manor and enjoy feeling that he could mentor his two still-tender half-siblings. The three bonded wordlessly in pain for having lost their respective mothers and being neglected by Fyodor Pavlovich to the point of falling to the care of Grigory Vasilievich and Marfa Ignatievna. Ivan told Dmitri all about Smerdyakov who was his same age, to the latter's great interest.

Alexei was still at the age between toddler and child. This babe so missed his mother in the long nights when he would weep for her, that Ivan had become accustomed to swallowing his own tears and telling him the same stories Sofia Ivanovna would tell them and with her similar consoling tone until Alyosha fell asleep. Of all the siblings, it's Ivan who had spent the most years with his mother, her death arriving when he was at an older age than when it arrived for Mitya and Alyosha both of whom had lived four years with theirs. Vanya's memories of Sofia Ivanovna are clearer than Alexei's of her and than Mitya's memories of Adelaïda Ivanovna, and he'd witnessed his mother pregnant and post-partum and witnessed her joys and sadness with more awareness; a special bond was forming between him and Sofia Ivanovna before she fell ill. Ivan is the most mothered though he is the saddest, and he's probably the more sad for having been mothered longer just to have such a blessing taken away. Perhaps it's why he began to drawn closer to cursing God and His world the older he grew.

Alexei's sadness also gave rise in Dmitri a great tenderness to act not only like a brother but also like a little father. In that first summer, Dmitri helped Ivan comfort Alyosha and comforted Ivan without the latter realizing. In the process, he learned to console himself, too, recalling his own memories of the strong-willed but troubled Adelaïda Ivanovna who on the last occasion he ever saw her had promised him fervently, with kisses he never forgot, that she would return for him: "with your mother's new husband, Mitya, my love, my soul, she will return! We will be happy, Mitenka, my son, flesh of my flesh, I will take you away from your father! Let go, Mitya, come, let me go! Don't keep me, no, for I'm going to go make a safe place for us! Wait for me, Dmitri, my only son!" One could say that to this day Dmitri waits.

The three of four brothers Karamazov spent their first summer in marvelous fun. They even brought joy to Polenov's aging pedigree-bred Borzai named Maja, with whom they'd play outside, though Maja would tire out much more easily than the boys and after a short time trot off to be content in merely watching the young humans delight in games. And, Sofia Ivanovna's sons both wept, Ivan less conspicuously, when autumn came and Mitya had to return home to his benefactor.

"Like I'm gonna forget my brothers from another mother?!"

Dmitri scowled and then farted loudly, to Ivan's horror and little Alyosha's great mirth (and subsequently Mitya's). Even Maja raised her head at the sound.

"To hell with that idea! Nah, I'll be back to mentor you both next summer even if I have to filch to get the money; in fact, I prefer that it come to that! And, if Polenov doesn't like it, I'll find a way to come and live here on my own and work at something: I'll be thirteen by then! And don't forget, Vanka, that next summer's when I'll tell you exactly how to love a woman, for, I probably won't be a virgin anymore," he dopily grinned, "at least I hope not!"

But, Polenov did indeed bring thirteen-year-old Dmitri Fyodorovich back next summer and the boy was still a virgin much to his chagrin. Mitya, however, was bigger now: he had sparse facial hair and smelled musky if he didn't bathe (which he didn't much like to do, anyway) and he'd found friends who'd shown him pictures of nude women and sex and from whom he'd pleasantly learned to "take care" of those pesky erections with which he'd wake up.

"I've had vodka," he boasted in his now-deeper voice though it still crackled sometimes and embarrassed him, "and, I can handle it like any grown man, my dear Vanya!"

The adolescent had decided within the year that he'd find his destiny at eighteen in the army, and invigorated nine-year-old Vanya and five-year-old Alyosha with imaginative scenarios of himself fighting the Poles for greater Russia. Less by then were Alexei Fyodorovich's tears, and more was his improving his language skills and watching and admiring the priests' ritualistic words and motions during Liturgy as though they were performing magic. Ivan Fyodorovich, however, in his trauma, had grown more sullen and had taken to furtive reading and fact-verifying; this personality trait would chafe against Mitya, who believed that all things could be learned "through the school of hard-knocks." 

Nevertheless, Dmitri remained the fun one and didn't at all reject Ivan and Alexei while he stayed at the manor in the lush summer. Much amused was he when he'd practice weapon-wielding forms he'd made Ivan go searching for in books in the village library, and five-year-old Alyosha would mimic him in his small way. Ivan would laugh, too, at his heart's little one. Maja was dying, but, when she had the strength for it she'd lay watching the three brothers outside.

It was during one of these play-acting moments that second summer together that Alyosha experienced something which remained deep within him and that he'd remember while in Paris banishing the spirit who had haunted Ivan and the rest of his family for several years.

Tableau: Ivan, sitting in the fragrant fluorescent grass under the morning sun with three books spread before him, sits thus so as to comment on and correct Mitya's weapon-wielding postures in between the time Mitya leaps along some dozen overturned wooden crates. These crates sit stacked by the servants and some more by Mitya. This all after Mitya had run several laps around the grounds, to build adrenaline and also show off his speed.

"You're twisting too much to the right," Ivan remarks for one of Mitya's poses, "out of tension, I think."

"Argh!"

Dmitri gets out of his stance and begins jumping again upon the boxes so as to relax, only to pose once more.

"That's better," Ivan says after comparing Mitya to the books thrice.

"Jump with Mitya, Vanya!" Alyosha cries from his position as spectator a few feet away. "Jump and pose!"

"Quiet, Alyosha," Ivan scolds, not without tenderness, "we're focusing,"

"Aw, bet ya can't look as manly as me!" Mitya harasses Ivan.

"I've never tried these poses and don't have your stamina yet while I'm still only nine years old, and, so, it'd be ridiculous to try," Ivan argues in that entirely logical way he'll always propose things, "besides, I don't plan to ever enter the military nor involve myself in fights --"

"Just jump instead of yammering!"

"Yes, jump, Vanka!"

"Later."

Dmitri then begins jumping with greater force than before, from crate to crate, Ivan and Alexei watching, until Ivan looks back to the books.

Suddenly, and Alyosha watches it in slow motion, the slats on one of the crates give under Mitya's force.

With a shocked look, arms flailing to no avail, and with an "ai, God!" Dmitri falls through them and down into the crate. This wouldn't be as alarming as if the way in which he falls doesn't look as though he's fallen straight through the earth: for, indeed, as Alexei later learns, the large overturned crate has been placed over a deep hole, and just how deep is unknown, for, there's no "bump" indicating to what depths Mitya has fallen.

Ivan upon hearing the cracks and "ai, God!" immediately looks up and also watches in surprise as Dmitri seems to fall and soundlessly disappear. Ivan's advantage is that he's right beside the crate and only has to get to his feet and look down to see what's happened to his brother. Such a thrill comes upon Vanya in the form of mirth and laughter, that he throws his head back and cackles, and then he begins rolling around on the grass in delight to the point of wheezing and weeping. Meanwhile, no other sound can Alexei hear.

Alyosha's five-year-old horror augments to such a degree that he feels as though the universe tells him that there are secret evils no one can ever do anything about, and that life always will be such. Such is his plight as he seemingly watches Ivan rejoice at Mitya's pain or at the very worst his death. Alyosha is old enough to understand that falls cause death. Where is Dmitri? How far has he fallen? How can such a thing have happened? He'd been right there, only a moment ago, young and brimming over with life and joy. A cry tears from the child's throat as tears flood his eyes, as he cries out for Dmitri, lost forever in the blink of an eye, and cries at the terrible fact that Ivan would turn out not to be human at all but a villain straight out of a story -- already he'd been dismayed at Smerdyakov experimenting with living and dead cats.

Ivan immediately looks to Alyosha and his face morphs away from joy and rather to concern. Before Alexei knows it, he's being half-dragged half-carried by Ivan as he screams in dismay, to the broken crate.

"Alyosha, Lyosha, look!" Vanya beseeches, trying to be consoling while still laughing. "Hahaha, ha, ah! Look down at our Mitya, you silly squirt, come on!"

"...Did...? Hahahaha!" Darling Mitya's voice, husky and cracked with laughter as he catches his breath -- oh, could it be!? -- rings out from the hole. "Hehehe, Vanka, did Alyosha see!?"

Alyosha opens his eyes and looks into that abyss that's about six feet deep and four feet wide with a slope, to see Dmitri laying on a heap of hay placed there for Maja's burial that's bound to happen any of these days, on his back rolling like Ivan in laughter, the boy not having been hurt in the least.

"Oh, no, oh, Alyoshenka, no," Mitya catches his breath and sits up, looking up into his poor little brother's weeping and agonized face, and like a child himself calls up, "don't cry, my small one! No, come on! It's just your stupid Mitya falling into hay, and I can't get hurt! Nothing hurts me! See, see? I'm fine!"

Ivan's removed the crate and retrieved a sturdy branch with which he can offer Dmitri so he can more easily climb out. Alyosha watches hungrily as his eldest brother wobbles on the bed of hay and then deftly uses the branch and Ivan's resistance to swiftly climb out of the hole and back up to the world.

Humiliation floods Alyosha but Dmitri manages to pick him up, for at thirteen he's already sturdy and Alyosha will always know that about him, and he actually cradles the child though Alexei's too big for that.

"Hey, hey, my little brother, listen, your Mitya will always pull through, so, you must forgive him for scaring you, eh?" Dmitri covers Alyosha's apricot-baby-skinned face wet with tears with kisses, murmuring, "I'm always going to be all right, and everything's always all right, darling, there you go, shh."

"Even I got scared for a moment there!" Ivan quips, secretly longing -- though he would never ever admit it to himself nor out loud, ever -- to be held and comforted with such love and such certainty, for he's done so to Alyosha but nobody's done it to him since his Sofia's passing. "But, it looked so funny!"

Dmitri, though still young, is no idiot.

"Hey, what if I did it on purpose just to make you laugh, Vanka? 'Cause you really need to!" Having put down the relieved and lulled Alyosha, he jostles Ivan's shoulder, looking at him with affection. "You gotta laugh more, brother! Come on!"

Mitya pulls Vanya close, his being almost a head taller, and laughs and feels his brother laugh too when he knows that he really wants to cry freely like Alyosha. Like Alyosha he's just as sad and lonely and horrified and lost, if not more for the reasons listed above. The orphaned siblings really only have each other to call family besides Grigory, Marfa and Smerdyakov, and because they're still children at the mercy of adults they can be torn apart at any moment. 

"Thanks for helping me outta there, too," he laughs, rocking Ivan, "'cause you could'a been a beast and left me like an idiot slipping on that slope and trying to move that crate all by myself."

Ivan fervently shakes his head no, and his shaking hands clutch at the back of Dmitri's shirt like he wishes he could stay longer like this without losing face.

"I wouldn't," he replies, muffled, into Mitya's chest.

"'Course you wouldn't!" Dmitri kisses the top of his head. "We take care of each other! Right? We're like the Three Musketeers! Except a lot braver and better-looking and with, one day, pretty girls who'll love us..."

"And boys, too!" Alyosha adds innocently, sidling up to his brothers, and speaking excitedly now that everything is once more beautiful, "for we must love everyone, even our enemies, like the Lord loves everyone! We, we're," he points with to himself and the other two and repeats a maxim he's been learning at the gymnasium, "brothers who love each other, and, and, that's how Christ wants 'brothers' to be in the Gospels, brothers who love: did you know that, Mitya?"

The child smiles and even the noon May sun feels dull in comparison.

"I told Vanya and he said, 'I already know, Alyosha, oh, I already know these things!' He always says he knows things, and he knows many things, but, Vanya, Vanya," he leans against Ivan and looks up with his big eyes that still see angels, "nobody knows every thing, except God!"

Dmitri and Ivan chuckle.

"Yes, it's strong that we're brothers who love one another!" Dmitri proclaims to Alyosha. "So, we're gonna be strong in the world and for the whole world! 'Cause strong is what 'Karamazov' really means!"

"I don't think that's--"

"Shh, Vanka! To be a Karamazov means we must be strong."

"And we must love!" Alyosha exuberantly cries imitating Dmitri, raising his arms.

Ivan's young and still-innocent heart moves.

"And we must be wise, too, as we look out for one another," he concludes with rising hope, comforted now, "and so, we must trust each other."

"Always, right?" Dmitri winks.

"Always," Ivan and Alexei promise with matching grins.

"Too bad I get first dibs on lunch, then, and I'm gonna hardly leave either of you any if you don't catch up!"

Dmitri sprints toward the house laughing while Ivan runs with all his might to keep up and Alyosha trails behind crying out, "Mitya, I don't eat a lot since I'm small! But Vanya is bigger and needs more, so, be fair!"

Maja dies happily that day.

+|)mitri+1van+/\lexei+
|<ARAMAZO\/

Alyosha strokes the ikon he'd brought with him from home, that of Dmitri's with the relics of Varvara of Kiev given to his brother by Mrs. Khokhlakova on the fatal night of his father's murder; he puts it around his own neck so that it hang beside the little golden Carmelite scapular. 

Liar, Dmitri! he scolds in his heart. You said you'd always be all right, and, now look from where we have to pull you out... and yet, Vanka's fallen more deeply than if he were with you the mines, Mitya, even deeper down that hole, where it seems there's no landing, neither cushion nor hard earth... So, how will we assess the damage? Oh, but he seems closer to health, darling brother, closer to recovery... He loves a woman, one very haunted within her own self... Well do you know her... Forgive Katerina, for despite her lacerations, and perhaps even due to them, she's helped breathe the Savior and His Mother into Ivan's heart... Hear me out there in that desert-tundra, for I can feel your heartbeat in my own, and know that I love you... I'll find a branch, Mitya, for you and for Vanya...

Know that I'm glad you have a friend... I'm glad, my little father, and I thank God. Cherish your friend... Mitya, thank you for being in my life. Thank you for choosing me to be your sibling. Thank God for you... If only you knew that your friend has a deep bond to our unloved half-brother, but, how can I explain? I think you'll sense it... You're wise, you're a true poet and lover and warrior trained by the rhythms of the fertile virgin earth from childhood, and I remember all you've ever said... Your beloved waits for you, and would you know she's even more beautiful than she was back then? Because she's in love! For all her beauty, no man does she ever look at... Your delicate flower from the Garden, 'pear,' your Graceful Grusha who loves a very strong Musketeer... 

I'm falling in love, too, but, how do I tell you about this person? This... boy. This boy has been unloved by very many in his life, and has suffered madness and the falling sickness... Oh, be kind to him, Mitya, and remember Smerdyakov; remember wanting to take Papa's life and then your own life but having too much love in your heart to do either... Now, imagine having no love... Imagine being in the hole because someone pushed you down in there to think about how no brothers will weep for you nor laugh with you nor kiss nor embrace you nor tell you that all shall be well... Imagine Vanya reduced to the incoherence that comes with mental horror, without having us and Katya and Grusha, nor Grigory Vasilievich and Marfa Ignatievna...

Then, after imagining all this, imagine having the title of prince... Imagine an unnecessary amount of wealth and status and people caring for your needs who don't seem like people at all because they don't consider you a person... Idiot prince... Orphaned and objectified prince... Prince of fools, the prince who falls and cannot rise... Iēsoûs ho Nazōraîos ho basileús tôn Ioudaíōn, with no resurrection, with perhaps the whisperings of spirits speaking of restoration... Nothing returns to nothing if he remembers nothing, it's the same nihilism which gripped Vanya...

This is the kind of life this boy was given by God as a test, and while he may have thought he turned to God for unyielding grace, he actually turned to Antichrist in the form of manic Slavophilia due to many misgivings and he caused much harm... For, we become that whom we gaze upon, my brother... Oh, be kind to me and him, Mitya... See how he has now finally turned to the true Christ and bears the weight of nearly forty years of darkness for memories... See his gift for bearing witness to the flow of time... See his ability to lure the spirits and do so with Christ as his only true friend...

Be strong, love much, be wise, brother. You're going to be all right. Trust me. Pray for me as much as I do you, which is constantly.

+/\lexei |<aramazo\/+
¥uródivyj୧ ♡ |-|oly ƒools
+|_yova /\/\yshki|\|+

After time alone, after private prayers, Prince Myshkin gladly acquiesces to Alyosha mildly asking that they fall asleep together in the former's bed. Now, the latter lays quietly beside him, shirtless like he is with cross and ikons on the nighttable, as Montmartre's glitter faintly glows beyond the curtain, listening to him tell the sad tale of the Ivolgin family with fondness for all members.

"I'd heard from Evgeny Pavlovich that Ganya had committed suicide some years ago," the prince sighs and so clearly recalls his deceased friend's tender kiss of apology upon the slap on his cheek that November afternoon he'd first arrived in Petersburg in '67, remembers having just met him at the Epanchin's and seeing his eyes flash in rage at Aglaya's rejection, "but, now, to imagine Kolya's been sent to that place and to think for what crime! Kolya married a truly wonderful girl, Vera Lukyanovna..."

The prince describes Lukyan Timofeevich Lebedev's family's involvement in his Petersburg calamity, and the family's link to the Ivolgin and the Epanchin, all of whom merely know that he lives on his inheritance in Paris but nothing of Aglaya and his marriage.

"Oh, how must the noble Nina Alexandrovna be suffering after another loss, God be with her! Kolya is one of few souls I've never been unable to trust in; was it Doktorenko's and Burdovsky's damned nihilism left over from Ippolit? Kolya's too wise for all that!"

Myshkin provides background on Ippolit and the other men who'd harassed him over his inheritance.

"No matter what Kolya's done, however, he and Mitya now have each other!" Alyosha wipes away Myshkin's tears before wiping away his own. "In the darkest holes, miracles do happen."

"Particularly there, my sweet former monk," Myshkin confirms, caressing Alyosha's cheek. "The Orthodox more than the Catholic reveres and contemplates Mt. Tabor, no? We'll get Mitya and Kolya out, I promise!"

Alyosha rests his cheek upon the prince's shoulder, treasuring the scent of his soap -- lavender, like the Provençal purple fields he mentioned yesterday.

"Mitya and Kolya have each other, while Vanya..." the youngest Karamazov plays a dazed cat's cradle with his and Myshkin's fingers, "As I prayed I considered the horrific depths Vanya's gone to and considered your having traveled to similar ones, Lev Nikolaevich, and just like Pavel Fyodorovich you'd be struck by the lightning spirit, and yet you say you have no soul! How...?"

Alyosha raises his head and looks in the dark at Lyova.

"If you can think you have no soul, it must mean that the abyss and the lightning still haunt you, angel."

Myshkin confirms it to be true.

"Ah, angels, my angel... Well, when the Swiss waterfall would reveal herself to be an angel, I'd see silk pour forth."

"Your playful sister in nature, the angel waterfall?" Alyosha smiles.

"Before gravity could drag her, such a sister made up her mind to rise again to the sky to evaporate; isn't that how silk threads are also naturally made, back and forth and back and forth?"

"Silk threads, Lyova? Yes, and by special worms, imagine! God's creation is wondrous."

Alyosha's flesh is dewy in the balm of summer night, unaccustomed is he to the elevated heat of this land, and while he contemplates the prince's words he unconsciously stretches out to cool down.

"And, so, that unstoppable water was actually rising back to her source the more she elegantly poured and poured, down she poured, but she was actually rising up, like a rise and fall, a rise and fall... a rise..."

"A risen fall," Alyosha smiles blissfully, eyes closed and recalling the mountains he's witnessed on the train ride here, imagining a hidden waterfall, "back and forth and back and forth."

"But, during the madness? Nothing moved. The water calcified."

Alyosha, immediately understanding, winces. The pain in his core eats at him.

"Ah!"

Taking the prince's hand, eyes shut tight against imagining such a nightmare, he compels the man to touch the center of his torso, like Ivan and Katerina had done to each other the night before.

"No, no, did all fragment? All twist?"

"All of it, Alyoshka," Lyova confirms, eyes downcast, and though he usually appears far younger than his age at most times, his face now looks more like that of a man of forty years of pain. "All the world's lines blurred and softness hardened so as to shatter, and all I could do was follow, and my most recent memories were of murder and electricity."

"Yet, grace still found you like mineral to magnet, found your flesh and soul, darling, through Férradan's visit and his healing!" Alyosha kisses Myshkin's hand, relieved. "Oh, praise God!"

"I stopped resisting grace, yes."

"The seed that falls on the ground and dies produces fruit!" Alyosha, eyes tender, shifts his pretty body in just his cotton pajama pants closer to the weary Myshkin. "Oh, and, your tree does have good roots! The tree is fertile and fragrant, Lyova!"

The prince murmurs against Alexei's fervent kisses to his jaw, pleading to be heard, "Alexei Fyodorovich, this is the moment to say that I know you're a virgin, and that you've the heart of a virgin, and I sense you have purer fantasies than you may even think, but, I'm not!"

Alyosha turns solemn.

"And, I've been vile!" Myshkin continues in agony. "And, I plead that you acknowledge this about me!"

"I can listen, my Prince."

Myshkin sighs and swallows and shifts so that he may more tenderly hold Alyosha as they lay side by side, bare-chested.

The prince is taller and sturdier than the young man, with a lighter complexion, and he's more toned; this is a genetic phenomenon as well as a testament to the fact that he has sixteen more years on Alyosha, and only traces of youthful nubility remain. Lev is fully adult, while Alexei still hasn't entirely filled out in maturity though he's past his teen years. Nevertheless, both men are lithe and lovely, their body types both being of the ascetic with elegant limbs, and they're both active and healthy and care for themselves. Lev Nikolaevich remains the more classically handsome in features, given the nature of his gene pool. Alexei Fyodorovich is the more striking and exotic-looking, and the more feminine in spirit and therefore the more mercurial.

"It has to do with the same feeling you described about sensing the woman in you."

"You've been intimate with," Alyosha blinks, panting slightly in calming his excitement at being so close to and skin to skin with his beloved, "certain people? Many?"

Myshkin hums at the term "intimate."

"In forsaking virginity once I first arrived here in '71, I wouldn't call my exploits intimate."

The prince's lip curls.

"In reverie at my being healed from catatonia and what's more no longer suffering epilepsy but instead possessing the knowledge to use magic, I followed certain dark desires I'd repressed, certain deviant desires, and I repent of doing so and yet the memories remain, and I want you to know me -- Aglaya Ivanovna and I have never spoken of it, for, she is a beautiful woman and my wife in name."

Myshkin reveals he's nearly certain that Aglaya intuits his past sins and his lingering tendencies, though it would be a sin to speak of them with her.

"Brother Dmitri used to follow his dark desires, too," Alyosha reveals, oddly as though they're two schoolboys in wonder at the things adults encounter, for he's never talked like this before, "and he told me, quite emphatically, Lyova, that he liked feeling depraved."

Lev Nikolaevich holds back an eyeroll. How endearing, he thinks, however: his beloved can be just as childish and obtuse as he used to be in his twenties.

"I don't imagine the good former Lieutenant Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov sinking quite down to my depths."

"No?" Alyosha's brows raise. "But, Mitya was insistent on Sodom."

"I imagine, and pardon my boldness, that the Don Juan your brother had been years ago probably seduced and deflowered a few poor unsuspecting ladies while taking advantage of his military title, and with this arrogance must he have blackmailed Katerina Ivanovna before repenting at the last minute," the prince imagines said Mitya and what he may look like, whether he looks anything like Alyosha, and his mental image does come close to the actual person for the prince's time-magic involves the psychic, "and he most likely also slept with some prostitutes -- perhaps even a few more than what's normal -- all while still being careful not to impregnate anyone and choosing women who looked like they didn't have diseases; but, I do imagine that he, like me, has deeply repented of his exploits."

"That he has, Lyova," Alyosha confirms, nodding solemnly, "in conversion back to the faith and out of great love for Grusha, and all that you described is all that I've also imagined from what I know and what he's suggested."

"But, Alyosha, what Dmitri Fyodorovich did is more natural in most men, where I sought out acts that are more often considered unnatural."

Myshkin sighs and admits rather candidly that he is actually attracted to men more frequently than he is to women, "though, as you know, Alexei Fyodorovich, certain women have torn through my passions enough that I can hardly ever say I've no attraction: I just more often romantically and sexually attract and am attracted to men, like mineral to magnet."

"With other men you've committed acts of Sodomy that are more than just wasting semen?" Alyosha ponders the thought, though he doesn't show scandal nor judgment. "More than Onanism?"

The prince confirms the reality to his young beloved.

"In sin, I've taken other men -- carefully, aware that none have diseases -- and have let myself be taken, in penetration," he gently places a hand on Alyosha's shoulder, averting his eyes, "and, I don't think you seek that -- despite how feminine you've shown to be at certain moments and precisely because true femininity recoils at such humiliating acts -- and, so, I don't want that kind of humiliation with you, Alexei Fyodorovich."

Prince Myshkin looks up into Alyosha's rapt gaze.

"Are any of the men you did these things with still in your life, in any way?"

"No, love, my affairs with both men and women were mostly all short-lived and all before Aglaya came to me in '74, though perhaps I'll occasionally see an individual here and there and remain stoic."

Myshkin ponders and then adds, "there was one gentleman I was very fond of, a young and talented poet of about nineteen back in spring of '73, and he dug his claws into me while being still involved with another gentleman, and this other gentleman does still frequent the same circles of several members of the Salon -- his name is Verrine, and the young man's Renauld -- but, Verrine is quite amicable about the issue now, though we're hardly acquaintances."

"And Renauld?"

"That little demon gave up all poetry and esotericism, ran from Paris in '75 and traveled throughout Europe working, and now I've gotten word that he's living in Ethiopia trading coffee and arms," Myshkin sighs, "aiming to amount to 'the Russian Prince Léon Nicolas Myshkin's wealth,' the bastard went and mentioned me on purpose and frenchified my name as a barb toward my shame in once having been such a Slavophile (meanwhile, he hates being French) -- he knew people are always shocked to know how much less wealth I have to my name than they imagine, where here I am in a humble place in Montmartre."

"First Colombia and now Ethiopia!" Alyosha grins an impish little grin. "Imagine that there are men you've once been in love with living in those lands!

Myshkin wryly though affectionately imitates his grin, while Alyosha kisses his cheeks in repentance.

"Did you happen to love Renauld?"

"In a way, Alyosha, but, Jean Nicolas Alphonse Renauld fascinated me more than inspired love, and his art is more a hypnotic drug than a glorification of God; it's a shame he was left-handed in his approach to the divine."

"And, Verrine loved him?"

"Philippe Verrine thought he loved him, but, he actually fired pistol shots at him in Brussels a few months after we ended our affair, and he was imprisoned for it."

"...And, this man is still here making acquaintances with the Salon, Lyova!?" Alyosha's brows raise.

"Hm, yes," Myshkin pouts and thinks aloud that he'll look out to avoid Verrine.

Then, he pivots back to Alyosha, insisting that he would bring the man down by luring him toward the perversity he once enjoyed: "I asked by the fountain how I could stop from bringing you down! No, I want to honor you and merely," he grins, sadly, "merely be with you, softly, slowly, together in love."

Alyosha presses a loving kiss of reassurance, of acceptance, to the prince's ready mouth, and then a few more as though drinking him in. Lightly laughing, then, he presses a few more and these deeply in order to express acquiescence. 

"Parfyon Semyonovich didn't kiss you like I'm doing so, my cherished Prince Myshkin, is what I intuit," Alexei says, voice husky, savoring the minty sweetness of their shared intimacies and their growing excitement, "or no, darling?"

In the midst of the ecstasy of being loved by Alyosha, Myshkin can't help laughing at this youth's ingenuity.

"A few hours ago you performed sacred magic that would have made those who saw Dionysius' martyrdom also gasp, and for the past ten minutes you've talked like a green Russian schoolboy!"

"Oh, can't I do both?"

"You caught me: it adds much to your charm."

The prince holds the young man closer, loving him with kisses and caresses and endearments as Alyosha was loving the prince a moment ago.

"No, Alyoshka, Parfyon Semyonovich didn't kiss me like you're doing so, nobody has."

Myshkin gratefully accepts more kisses and feels himself drawing closer to Alyosha's élan vital and vice versa.

"We're bonded through sin and death, our kisses were as painful as sin and death, and I still love him and forgive him for all that we together bear the responsibility of destroying each other and Nastasya Filippovna; but, such a person like you I've never before met and never before kissed," he runs a hand through the other man's dark hair, admiring his lovely face with his own celestial eyes, framed by straight dark blonde brows and feathery lashes like cirrus clouds, "and you must sense that."

Alyosha kisses Prince Myshkin in the most sensual way yet, fingers gently and firmly combing through his thick flaxen hair. The latter feels an emotional stirring that does signal to him the presence of his own soul, signals a reminder of the waterfall, signals virgin nature. The kiss turns open-mouthed as both our heroes read the other's thoughts, and the prince cradles his beloved's face as they so intimately taste the other. One wouldn't think Alyosha such a virgin when he's capable of sustaining the weight of passion in this way, but, this is perhaps just a part of his magic.

"What isn't Sodom, then, Lyova?" Alexei begs with a mouth flushed and bitten, pupils blown with desire within his silver irises, gaze heavy with eros.

As their hips suddenly and naturally draw up against the other's, Myshkin feels the young man's arousal press against his own.

"Ai, God!" Alyosha cries out against Myshkin's bare shoulder, hands running along his silken and curved lower back, gaze fluttering in ecstasy. "What isn't sin, then?"

The prince rests their foreheads together, enlightened eyes closed, breathing him in as a storm of pleasure courses through him and through the keening Alyosha. Fingers drag upon flesh, flesh heats, breath quickens.

"Whatever is done by self-emptying, by loving the other," a searing kiss meets Myshkin's raspy declaration, "by loving: body, mind, and heart."

"Do you love me, Lyova?"

"You need to ask, Alyoshenka!?"

"Then, love me, my soulmate -- like your waterfall, like silk from the worms, as the serpent moon reflects God's creation, as the moon moves the waters."

They love without penetrating nor even grasping, without even much fondling, but by a rise and a fall together against endless kisses, a rise and a fall, a rising fall, back and forth, until silk angels pour out waterfalls.